Full text of "History of the New York times, 1851-1921"

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By ELMER DAVIS

OJ The New York Times Editorial Staff

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PRESS OF J. J. LTTTUE ft IVES CO.
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

PAGE

Introduction vn

PART I

CHAPTER

I Beginnings of n^ r^Wj, 1851-1859 ... 3

II Civil War and Reconstruction, 1 860-1 869 . . 48

III The Times and the Tweed Ring 81

IV National Politics, 1872-1884 n?

V rA<f TzWj in Transition, 1 884-1 896 . ... 155

PART II

I Restoration of The Times, 1 896-1900 ... 175
II Conservatism, Independence, Democracy:

1900-1914 243

III Modern News-gathering, 1900-1914 .... 273

IV Some Aspects of Business Policy 310

V The Times in the War, 1914-1918 33 1

VI The Times Today Z70

Twenty-five Years' Record of Advertising

Growth 40^

Twenty-five Years' Record of Circulation

Growth 403

For the German People, Peace with Freedom 405

Roster of The New York Times Company . . 411

Index 4^9

iii

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

Adolph S. Ochs Frontispiece

Henry J. Raymond 26

George Jones 4^

Louis J. Jennings, Editor-in-chief 1 869-1 876 ... 58

John C. Reid, Managing Editor 1872-1889 ... 58

John Foord, Editor-in-chief 1 876-1 883 58

Former Homes of The Times 74

Charles R. Miller, Editor-in-chief 90

The 4th Times Building, Park Row, 1888-1905 . . 106

Edward Gary, Associate Editor, 1871-1917 ... 122

John Norris, Business Manager, 1900-191 1 ... 122

Times Square, the Genter for News 138

Adolph S. Ochs, August 18, 1896 187

The Times Editorial Gouncil 203

Garr V. Van Anda, Managing Editor 218

Louis Wiley, Business Manager 218

The Present Home, The Times Annex 234

Honor Roll 258

Assistants to the Publisher 282

Laying the Gornerstone — Times Building, January

18, 1904 298

Times Square World Series Baseball Growd ... 298

Rollo Ogden, Associate Editor 3^4

John H. Finley, Associate Editor 3^4

Times Building Illuminated for Victory .... 330

Main Entrance — Times Building 34^

Times Business Office 347

Views of the Composing Room 3^2

A View of the News Room 3^3

The First Press of n^ nWj, 1 85 1 378

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

A View of The Twies Pressroom 379

A View of The Times Rotogravure Pressroom . . 394
Automobile Trucks 395

FACSIMILE PAGES OF "THE NEW YORK TIMES'

First Issue September 18, 1851

First Ocean Cable is Laid . August 17, 1858 .
The Outbreak of the Civil

War April 13, 1861

Battle of Gettysburg . . . July 6, 1863 . .
The Fall of Richmond . . April 4, 1865 . .
Lee's Surrender .... April 10, 1865
The Assassination of Presi-
dent Lincoln April 15, 1865

The Tweed Disclosures . . July 22, 1 871 . .

The Hayes-Tilden Election . November 9, 1876]

Star Route Disclosure . . May 1 1, 188 1
The First Issue of the New

Management . . . . . August 19, 1896 .
Peary's Discovery of the Pole September 9, 1909
The Titanic Disaster . . . April 16, 1912
Beginningofthe World War . August 2, 1914
The Sinking of the Lusitania . May 8, 1915 . .
President Calls for War Dec-
laration April 3, 1917 . .

The Armistice Signed . . . November 11, 1918

Harding Nominated . . . June 13, 1920

18
34

SO
66
82

114

130
146
162

178
242
274
306
338

354
370
386

INTRODUCTION

THIS historical sketch of The New York Times
was prepared in commemoration of the quar-
ter-centenary of the present management, which
occurs on August i8, 1921, and of the seventieth
anniversary of the first issue of the paper, which
falls on September 18, 192 1. It was written by a
member of the editorial staff, Mr. Elmer Davis,
with such advice and assistance as other members
of the staff could give. Mr. Davis joined the staff of
The Times in 191 4, after his graduation from the
University of Oxford, England, which he attended
as a Rhodes Scholar from his native State, Indiana.
He modestly disclaims any idea that his work is to be
regarded as an ideal or definitive treatment of the
subject. Most of the material of Part I has been
drawn from the articles in The Times Jubilee Supple-
ment of 1901, and from Augustus Maverick's "Henry
J. Raymond and the New York Press." The second
part has been compiled with the cooperation and as-
sistance of many members of the staff. Without
aspiring to a wholly detached point of view, which
could hardly be achieved by men who have faith
in and affection for the institution they serve, Mr.
Davis believes that he has at any rate tried to tell
the story impartially. However, it is but just
to say that the unflagging industry and the Hter-
ary skill with which Mr. Davis has executed his

vii

INTRODUCTION

task command the sincere admiration of his associates.

The New York Times^s pecuHar position in the
esteem of the public may make its history of inter-
est not only to working newspapermen and students
of journalism but to many readers who are unfamiliar
with the technique of newspaper-making and un-
acquainted with the personnel of The Times. Some
episodes, particularly controversial episodes, have
been treated with a certain reserve, as it was felt that
it would not be wholly fair to present only one side
of the case. But in no instance has accuracy been
sacrificed to brevity, and it is the belief that nothing
relevant to the history of The Times, or to its inter-
pretation, has been omitted.

With respect to my own sentiments on the occa-
sion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the present
management of The Times, I can do no better than
to repeat here the following article, which appears
in The Times of August i8, 1921:

Today — twenty-five years ago — August 18,
1896 — The New York Times passed to my manage-
ment and has ever since been under my unrestricted
control. So it may be fitting that I render an ac-
count of my stewardship to those who have made
The New York Times of today possible — its readers
— and take occasion to make clearer the forces that
are truly directing and influencing its conduct. I
am reluctant to strike the personal note that may
manifest itself in this recital of the history of The
New York Times, as it has been my endeavor to have
the public as well as those who are associated in
creating the paper regard it as an institution and,

viii

INTRODUCTION

so far as possible and feasible, make impersonal the
treatment of news and its interpretation. The
human element, however, enters into all man's
activities and it fortunately exists in the conduct
of newspapers. A newspaper if possible freed from
the frailties of humanity, with no sense of responsi-
bility, no sympathies, no prejudices, no milk of
human kindness, would be a nuisance and a plague,
an excrescence on the bodies social and politic, and
would be despised and shunned and consequently
without influence and altogether an unnecessary
evil. We have made an effort to make The New
York Times a creditable human institution. To
what extent we have succeeded we are confident we
can leave to others to say; whether this effort has
contributed to the general welfare and to gaining
respect for the honesty, integrity and patriotism of
American newspapers.

I am pleased to be able to say that The New York
Times is firmly estabhshed as an independent con-
servative newspaper, free from any influence that
can direct or divert its management from a righteous
and public-spirited course. It is within itself finan-
cially independent and in the enjoyment of a large
and increasingly profitable legitimate income from
circulation receipts and advertising revenue — in
the aggregate probably the largest income of any
newspaper in the world. The net result of its opera-
tions is beyond the earlier dreams of those who are
its chief beneficiaries, and fortunately they know no
interest they can serve that can give them greater
joy, satisfaction and comfort. I wish that thought
could fi.nd lodgment in the minds of those who may

INTRODUCTION

be inclined to believe that some ulterior object may
at times influence the policy of The New York TimeSy
so that they may understand that, being free from
pecuniary necessity or personal greed, no sane man
would voluntarily forfeit the confidence and good-
will of intelligent people by degrading himself
through loss of his self-respect or the surrender of
his independence. Persons may disagree with The
New York Times — with its treatment of news and
its views thereon — but there is no ground on which
they can attribute to it base or improper motives
for such differences of opinion. The New York Times
is an open book and may be taken at its face value;
it is no worse than it may seem to appear; its faults
are those of human fallibility and we cherish the
knowledge that at least in purpose it is better than
we have been able to make it appear.

On this occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the present management I wish first to make our
grateful acknowledgments to the several hundred
thousand readers of The New York Times who have
expressed by their patronage their endorsement of
the kind of newspaper we are endeavoring to pro-
duce. We are fully sensible of the fact that our
editorial position on public questions has not always
had the unanimous approval of our readers; many
honestly differ from us; but whether we are right
or wrong our views are not directly or indirectly
presented with any thought that they may please or
displease a reader. We do not now nor have we ever
sought readers because of our favorable or unfavor-
able attitude toward men or measures. So we flatter
ourselves that the third of a miUion persons who

INTRODUCTION

daily purchase The New York Times and the more
than half a milHon who purchase it on Sunday do so
because they approve of our kind of newspaper, and
that is the inspiration to which we owe such success
as we enjoy.

To the advertisers who have paid many millions
of dollars for space in the advertising columns of
The New York Times we are grateful for generous
patronage and the many evidences of sympathy
and encouragement they have manifested, and
especially do we appreciate this proof of their under-
standing of the potency and value of newspaper
circulation among those who find such a newspaper
as The New York Times to their taste. The New
York Times has been forced to steadily increase
its advertising rates, and the difficulty was mini-
mized because its discriminating advertisers have
realized that the increases were not out of pro-
portion to the increased service tendered. We have
great pride in the high business standing of our
advertisers. It is of the rarest occurrence that a
high-class advertiser does not place The New York
Times first on his list. In this connection it can be
stated positively that no advertiser influences, or
ever has influenced, the conduct of The New York
Times or has been encouraged to seek any favors that
are not accorded any good citizen. If in the past
twenty-five years there has ever appeared an im-
proper line written for the purpose of holding or
securing advertising patronage, it was without the
knowledge or consent of the management.

Words fail me when I try to express the obliga-
tion and gratitude I feel to the capable, earnest,

INTRODUCTION

loyal men who have been associated with me in
making The New York Times. I am proud of the
fact that we have been able to obtain and retain
such men in the service of the paper. No newspaper
organization in the world has or has ever had, as a
group, so many experienced nev/spaper men with
love and pride of profession giving enthusiastically
and indefatigably their best thoughts and service to
informing honestly the public of the happenings and
occurrences of the day; who in their relations with
each other are gentlemanly and courteous and all
united in working harmoniously and with a common
purpose for giving unselfishly their very best ability
to making a newspaper that is enterprising, reliable
and trustworthy, and at the same time decent and
dignified; men who find joy in their work and have
profound sympathy with the general policies of The
New York Times, giving such zeal and devotion to
their respective duties as to create a character and
form a power that make The New York Times the
great newspaper it is; men of almost every shade of
political and religious opinion and belief, of every
variety of sympathy and conviction, all working
together in the belief that they are serving a news-
paper that tolerates no tampering with the news, no
coloring, no deception, and in the making of which
no writer is required, requested or even invited
to express any views that he does not honestly
entertain. With such men and under such condi-
tions the building up of The New York Times was a
pleasant task. No publisher ever had more faithful
and efficient assistants. I hesitate to make invidious
distinctions among the army of men who have aided

xii

INTRODUCTION

me in creating a newspaper, not so complete as I
hope it may yet become as we are better enabled to
take advantage of its opportunities, but which I
believe, nevertheless, now to be the most complete
in the world.

I wish, however, to select the notably conspicuous
figures whose great contributions to the success of
The New York Times I desire publicly to acknowledge,
and to express my sense of obligation for their able
support of my efforts to make The New York Times
the best newspaper in the world:

To Charles R. Miller, who from the beginning
has been my editor-in-chief, whose whole-hearted
sympathy with my opinions and my aims and pur-
poses with The Times has been an inspiration. His
scholarly attainments, his facility and lucidity of
expression, broad vision, extraordinary knowledge
of public affairs, having a statesman's conception of
their proper conduct, and his lofty patriotism have
made the editorial page of The New York Times
consulted and respected throughout the world, and
distinguished it as the foremost exponent of en-
lightened American public opinion.

To Carr V. Van Anda, who has been managing
editor of The New York Times for the past eighteen
years; to whose exceptional newspaper experience,
genius for news-gathering and marvelous apprecia-
tion of news value and fidelity to fairness and
thoroughness, knowing no friend or foe when pre-
siding over the news pages of The Times, the greatest
measure of credit is due for the high reputation it
has attained for the fullness, trustworthiness and
impartiality of its news service. His vigilance and

xiii

INTRODUCTION

faithfulness to the very highest and best traditions
of newspaper-making make him a tower of strength
to the organization.

To Louis Wiley, the business manager, who has
been associated with me almost from the beginning,
particularly devoting himself to the circulation and
advertising departments that have furnished the
bone and sinew to the business, and has, while main-
taining the very highest standards of business ethics,
extended the greatest courtesy and painstaking atten-
tion to all having occasion to have transactions with
The Times. Of unusual ability, alert, indefatigable
and agreeable, and in full accord and sympathy
with the policies of The Times, he has been one of
my most useful and valuable assistants. No one
has been more earnest and faithful to the duties that
come under his management — and these have
been multifarious — and he has made himself, as
he is, an integral part of the institution.

Because of the loyal support and skillful aid of
these three men, each preeminent in his particular
and important field of responsibility, the publisher
of The New York Times is free from some of the many
problems and anxieties that are associated with
newspaper-making for the reason that the reputa-
tion of the newspaper is in safe and prudent hands.
There are others who have been of noteworthy aid
in creating this great newspaper and their exceptional
ability unstintingly given me was helpful and of
enduring value, and their contribution is indelibly
impressed in the results that have been achieved:
Edward Cary (deceased), in the editorial depart-
ment; John Norris (deceased), in the business and

xiv

INTRODUCTION

mechanical departments; William C. Reick, Henry
Loewenthal, and Arthur R. Greaves (deceased), in
the news department. The work of these men was
constructive and an inspiration, and conspicuously
helpful in the building of the newspaper. I dare not
go further in the personnel of the splendid men and
women who have so ably, unselfishly and enthusi-
astically aided in the work of bringing The New
York Times to its high eminence in public favor, for
fear of not properly and adequately estimating their
individual contribution to that end. Suffice it that
to their ability, devotion to duty, kind sympathy
and confidence, credit is due in great measure for
what has been accomplished. With such men and
women to assist, almost any deserving enterprise
should be a pronounced success. They are all en-
titled to share in whatever praise may be accorded
The Times as a newspaper.

Now as to the ownership of The New York Times.
It is owned by a corporation with ^1,000,000 com-
mon and ^4,000,000 preferred 8 per cent stock (the
latter recently issued as a stock dividend). I and
the immediate members of my family own and
control 64 per cent of the shares of the company free
and unencumbered, and not one share of our holdings
is pledged or hypothecated; 25 per cent more of the
shares is held by those who are or have been em-
ployed by The Times, and the remaining 1 1 per cent
of the shares is distributed among twenty-eight in-
dividuals or estates (all Americans) who acquired
the stock by exchanging for it shares of the old
company, the largest individual holder of the latter
group holding only one-quarter of i per cent of the

INTRODUCTION

capital stock. The New York Times Company has
real estate and paper-mill properties costing more
than ^5,000,000, and on these properties there are
unmatured bonds and mortgages amounting to
^1,500,000, constituting the sum total of the in-
debtedness of the company except its current monthly
accounts payable. The cash reserves of the com-
pany are more than sufficient to pay its total funded
indebtedness and leave free a large and sufficient
working capital. So it can be said that The New
York Times Company is virtually free of indebted-
ness. It has a gross annual income exceeding
^15,000,000, and only about 3 per cent of its gross
annual income is distributed to its shareholders; the
remainder of its income is employed in the develop-
ment and expansion of its business. This result
has been achieved in a business that twenty-five
years ago was running at a loss of ^1000 a day, by
the investment of only $200,000 of new capital.
It is the result of the application of practical common
sense by experienced newspaper-makers who under-
took the management of a newspaper of long and
good reputation — temporarily crippled by mis-
management and untoward universal financial condi-
tions — in the firm belief that a clientele existed in
the greatest city in the world for a newspaper edited
for intelligent, thoughtful people. At the time
The Times passed to its present management —
1896 — the rapidly increasing circulation and ad-
vertising of the sensational newspaper indulging in
coarse, vulgar and inane features, muck-raking and
crusades of every character were creating a widely
extending impression that otherwise a newspaper

xvi

INTRODUCTION

would be dull, stupid and unprofitable. It was this
situation that caused The New York Times to hoist
its legend of ''All the News That's Fit to Print."
The wiseacres of journalism prophesied an early-
failure; the motto was made sport of and ridiculed.
It was this prevailing impression that proved a
valuable factor in the growth of The Times, for in
the field it was trying to cover it met no serious
competition and thus was for a considerable time
left to its full benefit. The neglected non-sensa-
tional departments of news of the other daily morn-
ing newspapers were quietly and unostentatiously
improved in The New York Times and made as far
as possible complete — such as financial news,
market reports, real estate transactions, court
records, commercial and educational news; the news
of books, the routine affairs of the National, State
and City Governments; and there were also attrac-
tively presented decent and trustworthy pictures of
men, women and events. Altogether the task under-
taken in this direction was to tell promptly and
accurately the happenings and occurrences that were
not sensational but of real importance in the affairs
of the people. This supplemented the general news
of the day intelligently and quietly presented and
with editorial interpretation that was fair and in-
formative. The columns of The Times were open
without money and without price for the presenta-
tion of views honestly differing with the opinions of
The Times, and this was practiced to an extent never
theretofore done by a newspaper. All of this soon
gave The Times the reputation that its readers could
expect full and trustworthy information regarding

xvii

INTRODUCTION

any and all angles of the news. In the very first
political campaign during the regime of the present
management such was the fairness and impartiality
of The Times news reports that at its close both the
Democratic and Republican managers of the Na-
tional Committees voluntarily sent letters of thanks
and appreciation to The Times management.

We began on August i8, 1896, with a daily issue of
18,900, over half of which were returned unsold, and,
as said before, with a deficit of ^1000 a day. The
gross income for the first year was ^561,423, and at
the end of the year the deficit was ^68,121.67. The
second year the deficit was $78,559; but in the third
year the balance was $50,252 on the right side and
has been so increasingly every year since. The
gross income for the period of twenty-five years has
been, in round figures, $100,000,000, every dollar of
which, less an average of $125,000 a year withdrawn
from the business and distributed as dividends, has
been expended in making The Times what it is today.
Not one dollar of the $100,000,000 was a gift or a
gratuity, but every cent a legitimate newspaper
income. It is a fortunate outcome for those who
own the shares of The New York Times Company
and who have been hopeful and patient for so many
years, but it has also been a happy and encouraging
result for the country and particularly for American
journalism.

There was a time when it was no secret in financial
circles that The New York Times Company had
limited resources and that it was an active borrower,
and this gave rise to speculation as to where the
necessary funds were obtained. As a result wild

xviii

INTRODUCTION

and stupid conjectures were given currency when-
ever it suited the purpose of malevolent persons to
attempt to discredit the newspaper. Among the
stories were these: That there was English or
foreign capital in The Times; that traction interests
were owners or controllers; that certain political
factions were "backing" it; that department stores
were financially interested; that well-known Wall
Street concerns directed its policy, and variations
ad libitum. The truth is that from the day I as-
sumed the management of The New York Times —
twenty-five years ago today — I have been in abso-
lute and free control, and no man or interest was
ever in a position to direct or demand of me to do
anything with The Times, and no one ever attempted
to do so. So far as the management of The New
York Times is concerned we can say, without fear
of any contradiction from the thousands who in the
past twenty-five years have been employed on The
Times, that never a line appeared in its columns to
pay a real or imaginary debt or to gain expected
favors. The New York Times owes no man or
interest any support or goodwill that it does not owe
to every good man and worthy cause.

The operation of so large an enterprise, including
real estate transactions and large building construc-
tion, of course required capital, and the general
impression that the newspaper business is extra-
hazardous, and the personal equation the all-im-
portant factor, made financing no easy task; so it
cannot be surprising to know that we had many
and continued financial problems made more than
ordinarily difficult as we scrupulously avoided the

xix

INTRODUCTION

easiest way, knowing full well that in that direction
the enterprise would be imperiled and robbed of the
attraction that made the work a joy, an inspiration
and opportunity for public service. The financing,
however, was always done on a strictly business
basis. Not a dollar was borrowed at less than the
prevailing rate of interest, and principal and interest
were paid to the last cent. In no single instance
did we receive any financial accommodation for a
selfish motive, and never in a single instance was it
predicated on any personal benefits, direct or in-
direct, asked or expected.

I was reluctant to go at such length into the busi-
ness and financial history of The New York Times,
but think this occasion is the time once and for all
to make the indisputable facts clear.

I do not wish to overemphasize the material
progress of The New York Times, as like results may
be obtained in any well-conducted business in the
world's greatest metropolis, for on this twenty-fifth
anniversary of the present management we prefer
to be appraised by the product we are offering the
public for their information and guidance, and to
have it judged by the highest standards of honesty,
fairness and cleanhness, and pubHc service appHed
in making newspapers. We present the nine thou-
sand and thirty-one issues of The New York Times
that have appeared during the past twenty-five
years for review and criticism. They are not with-
out faults and shortcomings and not altogether what
we should have wished them to be, but they are our
best under the circumstances of their construction.
We have little to regret for what has appeared

INTRODUCTION

therein, but in no issue was principle ever surrendered
or subordinated to expediency. We have not yet
reached our ideal of a newspaper in contents or
make-up and may never be able to achieve it, but
we shall continue to improve, and to that end we
hope to merit a continuance of our pleasant and
profitable relations with intelligent men and women.
With respect to the principles and policies of The
New York Times that represent our platform and
our guide I can do no better than to repeat what was
announced would be the policies of The Times when
assuming its control and management, and shall
leave to others to say how well we have lived up to
that declaration. The following was the salutatory
appearing in the issue of The New York Times of
Wednesday, August 19, 1896:

ANNOUNCEMENT

To undertake the management of The New York Times, with
its great history for right doing, and to attempt to keep bright
the lustre which Henry J. Raymond and George Jones have
given it, is an extraordinary task. But if a sincere desire to
conduct a high-standard newspaper, clean, dignified and trust-
worthy, requires for success honesty, watchfulness, earnestness,
industry, and practical knowledge applied with common sense,
I entertain the hope that I can succeed and maintain the high
estimate that thoughtful, pure-minded people have ever had of
The New York Times.

It will be my earnest aim that The New York Times give the
news, all the news, in concise and attractive form, in language
that is permissible in good society, and give it as early, if not
earlier than it can be learned through any other reliable medium;
to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless
of party, sect, or interests involved; to make of the columns of
The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all ques-

xxi

INTRODUCTION

tlons of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent
discussion from all shades of opinion.

There will be no radical changes in the personnel of the present
efficient staff. Mr. Charles R. Miller, who has so ably for many
years presided over the editorial page, will continue to be the
editor; nor will there be a departure from the general tone and
character and policies pursued with relation to public questions
that have distinguished The New York Times as a non-partisan
newspaper — unless it be, if possible, to intensify its devotion
to the cause of sound money and tariff reform, opposition to
wastefulness and peculation in administering public affairs, and
in its advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with good govern-
ment, and no more government than is absolutely necessary to
protect society, maintain individual and vested rights, and
assure the free exercise of a sound conscience.

Adolph S. Ochs.
New York City, August iS, i8g6.

The foregoing was our invitation for public favor
twenty-five years ago, and I reaffirm it today in the
full conviction based on my experience that these are
the proper principles that should be maintained in
the conduct of a representative American daily news-
paper.

Adolph S. Ochs.

New York City, August i8, igsi.

XXll

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

PART I

CHAPTER I
Beginnings of The Times, 1851-1859

TN a sense The New York Times is the result of an
^ accident, or of a sequence of accidents. Sooner
or later Henry J. Raymond and George Jones would
have become partners in the production of a news-
paper; and wherever or whatever that newspaper
might have been, its character would have been
fixed by the common ideals which these men held,
as its prosperity would have been insured by their
unusually fortunate combination of talents. But
it was only a chance that this Raymond-Jones
newspaper, whose early years established the stand-
ard and the character which The Times strives to
maintain today, was The New York Times and not
The Albany Evening Journal; and it took more
accidents to bring Raymond and Jones together
in 1851.

The acquaintance and friendship of the two men
who directed The Times for the first four decades
of its history began in the early forties, in the office
of The New York Tribune. Jones, a native of Ver-
mont, had come to New York and gone into business,
and had been invited by Horace Greeley to become
his partner in the establishment of The Tribune in
1 841. Whether from a failure to realize the wider
field for newspaper enterprise which was opening in
New York, or from a well-grounded distrust of

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Greeley's business judgment, Jones refused; but he
did take a place in the Tribune business office, and
there not only acquired a thorough familiarity with
what may be called the alimentary system of a
newspaper, but formed a friendship with Raymond,
who was Greeley's principal editorial assistant.
Presently Raymond went over to The Courier and
Enquirer^ then edited by General James Watson
Webb, and Jones later moved to Albany, where he
engaged in the business of redeeming bank notes.
In those days, when almost anybody could start a
bank and issue paper money which might or might
not have a solid reserve behind it, this was a some-
what hazardous occupation, but Jones made it
profitable. His business ability commended itself
to Thurlow Weed, who had become acquainted
with Raymond both as a newspaperman and as a
rising young Whig poHtician. In 1848 Weed wanted
to get out of The Albany Evening Journal, and offered
to sell it to the two friends. Raymond and Jones
were willing, but one of Weed's partners would not
let go, so the enterprise came to nothing. But it
had shown Raymond and Jones that they were not
alone in thinking that they could get out a pretty
good newspaper. For the moment Raymond's chief
attention was diverted to politics; he was elected to
the Assembly in 1849 and became its Speaker two
years later. But the idea of a Raymond-Jones
newspaper never died thereafter.

In 1850 General Webb went to Europe and left
Raymond in temporary charge of The Courier and
Enquirer, Raymond not only failed to use his
political influence to promote Webb's brief Senatorial

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

boom, but incurred his chiefs disfavor by speaking
out some plain truths on the slavery question in
connection with the compromise proposals of that
year. Raymond was not then, and never was till
well along in the Civil War, an abolitionist; but he
did not think that the more urgent question of the
slave power in politics could be cured by ignoring
it or by tame surrender. His independence got
him into Webb's bad graces, and when Raymond
went to Albany for the legislative session that winter
he was eager to get away from Webb and start out
for himself.

Jones was somewhat more reluctant to give up a
business which he had made profitable, but it hap-
pened that a bill was then before the legislature
which proposed to regulate the rate of bank-note
redemption so severely that it would make the
business entirely too hazardous for men of integrity.
One day early in 1851, Jones and Raymond were
walking across the Hudson on the ice when Jones
observed that he had heard that The Tribune had
made a profit of ^60,000 — in those days an enormous
sum — in the past year. This renewed Raymond's
enthusiasm, and before they reached the other shore
he had obtained Jones's promise to join him, if the re-
demption bill passed, in the establishment of a new
daily in New York. The bill did pass. Jones closed
up his business, and he and his business associate,
E. B. Wesley, prepared to put their money, with
Raymond's experience, into the new venture.

But if this series of accidents led directly to the
establishment of The Times, it is nevertheless true
that essentially the paper was brought into being to

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

fill a keenly felt want in the New York journalism of
the day. The conditions which made possible the
prosperity of The Times in the fifties were in general
the conditions which opened the way for the spec-
tacularly successful reconstruction of The Times in
the nineties. In each case New York newspapers,
numerous and varied as they were, had none the
less left vacant a large and profitable part of the
newspaper field; and in each case the demand for a
certain kind of paper — a paper characterized under
Raymond as under Ochs by the somewhat unpre-
tentious but still popular quahties of moderation and
decency — created the supply. In the fifties as in
the nineties there were many newspaper readers in
New York who wanted a paper which first of all
gave the news, but which was not distorted by
eccentricities of a personal editorial attitude or
tainted by excessive attention to folly, immorality
and crime. The character which Raymond gave
to The Times — excellence in news service, avoid-
ance of fantastic extremes in editorial opinion, and a
general sobriety in manner — is the character which
The Times has retained ever since, and which those
now engaged in producing the paper hope it still
retains.

There was a field for a sane and sensible newspaper
in New York in 1851. The city had not yet re-
covered from its surprise at finding itself a great
metropolis, with more than half a million people,
already far beyond its old rivals of the Atlantic sea-
board and obviously destined to still greater growth
in the future. It was spreading rapidly, sprawlingly,
with little attention to the manner of its extension;

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

its government was execrable, its civic beauties
few and well concealed, its spirit still affected by the
old small-town tradition. But it was growing; it
was attracting new men by the thousands, ambitious
young men like Raymond, from up-state; like Jones
and others, many others, from New England. Those
men were beginning the work of making New York,
to which their most active and able successors of
more recent times have done little more than add a
few embellishments.

Both the old spirit and the new were reflected in
the newspapers of New York. There still survived
some excellent examples of the type of newspaper
which had prevailed in the earlier decades of the
century — the so-called blanket sheets, literally big
enough to be slept under, especially by those who
had tried to read them. They were massive, expen-
sive, and dull; dignified if not respectable; content
with a small circulation among gentlemen who
had plenty of time, if not much inclination,
for reading, and were willing enough to get around
to this morning's news about the middle of next
week. The new era began with the establishment
of The Sun in 1833 — a paper which for the first
time in America discovered the rudimentary literacy
of the lower classes. The Sun of 1833, or even of
185 1, was nothing like The Sun as made famous by
Dana long afterward; it was filled for the most part
with trivialities, and according to Augustus Maver-
ick, Raymond's biographer, was read in 1851 chiefly
by ** domestics in quest of employment, and cart-
men dozing at street corners in waiting for a job."
But it had opened up a new field, and this field was

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

entered two years later by a much more interesting
and much better newspaper, James Gordon Ben-
nett's Herald.

Bennett was the inventor of almost everything,
good and bad, in modern journalism. He was the
first editor who gave his chief attention to the collec-
tion of news, and before long his competition had
compelled all newspapers which made any preten-
sion to influence to undertake unheard-of expendi-
tures and to compete with him in the utilization
of the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph and
other new inventions just coming into use. In his
salutatory to the public he disclaimed, among other
things, "all principle, as it is called.'* His enemies
and professional rivals — in the early days of The
Herald the two terms were synonymous — would
have said that he had merely rejected all good princi-
ples. Tammany Hall and slavery usually found The
Herald on their side. Moreover, Bennett invented
yellow journalism; he discovered and encouraged
the popular taste for vicarious vice and crime, and
before long respectable citizens who would have liked
to read The Herald for the news felt constrained to
exclude it from their homes for fear of its effect on
the somewhat sensitive morals of the Victorian
family.

It must be admitted that this "obscene'' Herald
which was regarded with such horror in the middle
of the nineteenth century was not so very terrible,
judged by the more elastic standards of our time.
Every page of every issue bears the mark of Bennett's
powerful and eccentric talent, and it undoubtedly
did give more space to news of crime and human

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

error than its rivals; but it respected certain reti-
cences which had passed into history before many
of the night city editors of 1921 were born. How-
ever, moral standards were more exigent in those
days, and Bennett's frank and premature cynicism
probably contributed to the ill repute of his paper.
In the forties good principles were exemplified by
few, but professed by everybody but Bennett; and it
was the shrinking of virtuous citizens from the
loathsome newspaper whose editor dared to talk as
most people acted that opened the way for Greeley's
success with The Tribune.

When Greeley established The Tribune in 1841
Bennett had things pretty much his own way. Of
the heavier and more conservative sheets The Courier
and Enquirer was kept in the foreground by the
aggressive and pugnacious personality of James
Watson Webb, but none of these papers could vie
with Bennett in popularity or financial success.
The Sun had long since been beaten in its own field,
and no one then foresaw its ultimate revenge in that
recent and curious transaction wherein The Herald
swallowed The Su7i, and emerged from the process
so exactly like The Sun as to furnish perhaps the
best exemplification in history of the proverb,
"Man ist was man isst." But Greeley soon gave
Bennett real competition. In the first place, The
Sun and The Herald leaned toward the Democrats,
and Greeley first came forward to offer a cheap
newspaper to the Whigs. Moreover, The Tribune
as a newspaper was about as good as The Herald,
and it carefully avoided all The Herald's offenses
against the taste of the time. Yet The Tribune itself

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

soon incurred moral disapproval because of Greeley's
advocacy of the principles of Fourieristic Socialism.
The chief characteristic of The Tribune under
Greeley was an aggressive and even ostentatious
purity. "Immoral and degrading police reports,"
and any notices of the existence of the theater,
whether in news or advertising, were at first scrupu-
lously excluded. Greeley appealed to man as he
likes to pretend to be, Bennett to man as he is
occasionally compelled to admit he really is. Greeley
promoted temperance with a zeal equaled only by that
other eminent moralist of the time, P. T. Barnum, and
professed an intention to make The Tribune, though
a penny paper, *'a welcome visitor at the family
fireside.'' Heads of families soon found it rather
startling that a paper with such an ambition was
becoming the vehicle of doctrines whose logical
application would make the family obsolete. Gree-
ley's Socialism was no doubt sincere — he seems to
have been the type of man who was so sincere in
everything he did as to make the impartial observer
somewhat more tolerant of judicious hypocrisy —
and certainly his observation of the panic of 1837,
and of the struggles between Tammany and the
local Whig machine for the control of the city govern-
ment, might have justified him in concluding that
no political and economic organization of society
could be much worse than that which actually
obtained. Fourierism was popular; Brook Farm,
the Oneida Community, New Harmony, and hun-
dreds of less known and less successful communistic
experiments were being attempted in various parts
of the country. Greeley's advocacy of the reorgani-

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

zation of society on the basis of the "social phalanx"
was not hampered by any consideration of the
difficulty of fitting a metropolitan newspaper with a
large circulation into a state of phalangites, but
doubtless he was taking only one step at a time, and
saw no reason for crossing this bridge before he
came to it. In the meantime Albert Brisbane,
father of the better known Arthur Brisbane, and
an eminent apostle of what Mr. Wells would
doubtless call the Neanderthal type of SociaHsm,
was allowed the run of The Tribune, and enjoyed
the esteem of its editors.

Greeley, to be sure, was no more than what would
now be called a parlor Bolshevik, but it was only
natural that his professional and commercial rivals,
in that acrimonious age, should suspect him of a
willingness to acquiesce in the logical extension of
his doctrines to other parts of the house. Despite
his protests and denials, it suited the other news-
papers of the city to regard him as the advocate of
free love; and the controversy found fullest
expression in the autumn of 1846, in an editorial
warfare between Greeley and his old employe Ray-
mond, then on The Courier and Enquirer. A dozen
or so long articles were written on each side, and
Raymond succeeded in proving, to the entire satis-
faction of everybody who agreed with him, that the
doctrines advocated by The Tribune not only would
be destructive of property right, family affection,
and political association, but were contrary to the
teachings of revealed religion — an assertion which
he evidently regarded as crushing, and which in
1846 undoubtedly was.

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Tribune prospered in spite of these handicaps;
but there were a great many people who wanted the
news as The Tribune printed it, without the sensa-
tional matter to be found in The Herald, and equally
without the questionable and subversive doctrines
which might be seen lurking beneath the chest-
thumping morality of The Tribune^ s editorial page.
To its enthusiasm for Socialism, moreover. The
Tribune added a vigorous propaganda for Irish
freedom, and the growing power of the Irish element
in Tammany Hall had already aroused a certain
reluctance, readily intelligible today, to allow New
York City to be used as an overseas base for this
hardy perennial conflict. To this public Raymond
and Jones decided to appeal — not only because it
was there and waiting for a paper suited to its taste,
but also because its taste happened to be the taste
of Raymond and Jones.

Raymond went to Europe for a vacation in the
summer of 1851, after drawing up with Jones and
Wesley the plans for the new paper. His own
expression in a letter to his brother, dated from
London in June, 1851, is modest enough — '*Two
gentlemen in Albany propose to start a new paper in
New York early in September, and I shall probably
edit it.*' This was undoubtedly the way it seemed
to Raymond at the time, but it was Raymond's
personality that made the paper's character at the
outset, and in the Jubilee Supplement of The Times,
issued in 1901, it was set down as the measured
judgment of the editors of the paper that " The
Times has always been at its best when its conduct
approached most nearly to his ideal of a daily news-

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

paper." After Raymond's death circumstances com-
pelled Jones to discover and display for a time his
own very great talent as supervisor of the editorial
policy of The Times; but for the eighteen years
from its establishment to Raymond's death it was
known to the country as Raymond's newspaper.
Its virtues were largely his; its weakness was chiefly
due to his one uncontrollable defect, an addiction
to politics.

Raymond was born on a farm near Lima, N. Y., in
1820, and graduated from the University of Vermont
in 1840. For a few months thereafter he supported
himself in New York as a free lance newspaperman,
but was about to give it up in despair and become a
school teacher in North Carolina when Greeley, for
whom he had done some writing on space, offered
him a salary of eight dollars a week. It was Greeley
who in later years, when Raymond was a rival
editor, bestowed on him the title of "the Little
Villain" — a mild enough epithet according to the
standards of journaHstic courtesy in the fifties;
but Greeley in his more moderate moments liked
Raymond, and said that "a more generally efficient
journaHst I never saw," and that Raymond was
the only man who ever worked for him whom he
had had to reprove for working too hard.

After three years with Greeley, Raymond went
over to The Courier and Enquirer^ and remained
with that paper till plans had been made for the
estabHshment of The Times. By that time, though
only thirty-one, he was one of the best known and
ablest newspapermen in New York. He was a small
man, but pugnacious, as editors had to be in those

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

days. Though it was Raymond's fortune to begin
his independent career after the close of the period
when editors went about in momentary expectation
(or meditation) of personal violence, he had occasion
more than once to display not only moral but physical
courage in defense of his principles. As a reporter
and editorial writer he was remarkably gifted; his
writing was rapid, his style clear; a rarer virtue in
those times, his copy was legible. A feat recorded
by his biographer, Maverick, who says he was an
eyewitness, is here cited without comment: on the
day of Daniel Webster's death Raymond wrote, in the
late afternoon and early evening, sixteen columns of
the obituary — in longhand, and without the aid of
such material as a newspaper"morgue"now furnishes.
In his views on public questions Raymond was if
anything too well balanced. He often lamented a
habit of mind which inclined him to see both sides
in any dispute. This may have hampered him as a
politician, but on the whole it probably did The Times
more good than harm. There were plenty of infuri-
ated and vituperant newspapers in those days, and
the'^success of The Times in the fifties showed that a
considerable part of the public approved a measure
of temperance in opinions on public affairs. To a
certain extent, however, Raymond was really ahead
of the time. His attitude toward the problems which
led to and arose out of the Civil War, for example, is
in almost every detail that which is approved by the
judgment of history in so far as that judgment can
ever be set down with certainty. He was a Whig
in the early fifties, but not a bigoted Whig. He was
not an abolitionist, but he beheved that the domi-

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

nation of the federal government by the slave states
in the interest of slavery — the domination of a
majority by a minority — must be ended. In the
middle of the decade he became a free-soil man and
then one of the founders of the Republican party.
During the war he was a bitter-ender, even in the
dark days when better advertised patriots were
willing to accept a peace without victory; but when
the end was reached Raymond did his best to remove
the bitterness. It would have been infinitely better
for the whole country if Raymond and not Thaddeus
Stevens had been allowed to lay down the recon-
struction poHcy, and though Raymond went astray
in thinking for a time that Andrew Johnson was all
that a man in his position, with his enemies, ought
to have been, the soundness of the principles which
Raymond held and which Johnson rather spasmodi-
cally tried to apply has been demonstrated by the
subsequent course of history.

There can be no doubt, however, that Raymond's
preoccupation with politics distracted much of his
attention from The Times, and the paper suffered
heavily, though not for long, from his unpopularity
in the early days of reconstruction. In the fifties
it was not yet realized that the editor of a successful
New York paper was a bigger man than the Speaker
of the Assembly, or even the Lieutenant-Governor;
yet it was characteristic of Raymond that when
some of his friends wanted to put him up for Gov-
ernor, in 1856, he refused for fear his aggressive
record as a Whig might stand in the way of the rap-
prochement of free-soil Whigs and free-soil Demo-
crats in the new Republican party.

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Raymond has perhaps too hastily been called a
political follower of Thurlow Weed and William H.
Seward, and some writers have even regarded Weed
as a sort of man behind the throne on The Times.
It is a curious foible of a certain type of mind that
it is unable to imagine a newspaper editor as one
who may, on some public questions, honestly have
the same view as that held by other persons. Unless
he is absolutely unique and eccentric in his political
opinions, he is presumed by certain critics to be
bought or •otherwise controlled by the people who
agree with him. Raymond did indeed have a great
respect for Weed^s political judgment, a general
agreement with Weed's political views, and a friendly
relation with Weed himself. In his early political
career he was in a sense a follower of Weed, just* as
he was a "follower*' of Seward in i860 to the extent
of supporting him for the presidential nornination.
But on many matters he disagreed with these gentle-
men, and while their relative rank in political affairs
was considerably higher than his in the fifties,
Raymond's vigorous support of Lincoln gave him a
personal influence during the Civil War that was
due to Raymond alone. In 1864, as chairman of
the Republican National Committee, he could hardly
be described as a follower of anybody but Lincoln,
who fully recognized his immense value in that year
to the party and the nation.

Weed often and naturally came into the Times
ofHce to talk politics with Raymond, and no doubt
to offer occasional thoughts on political journalism;
but Raymond knew a good deal about politics and
a good deal more about journalism, and would have

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

known it if he had never seen Weed in his life. For
a short time just after the Civil War Weed was a
contributor of political articles to the paper; but
there seems to be no foundation for the theory that
he was ever its dominating influence, or ever tried
to be. Raymond was not so inhuman as to have no
friends, or so original as to have no political associ-
ates, but he and he alone was editor of The Times.

On August 5, 1851, the association which was to
publish the new paper was formed under the name
of Raymond, Jones & Company. In August, i860,
the name was changed to H. J. Raymond & Com-
pany; and in July, 1871, after Raymond's heirs had
sold out their holdings, to The New York Times.
The stock was divided into a hundred shares, the
nominal par value of which seems to have been set
by tacit* agreement at ^1000. Raymond received
twenty shares **as an equivalent for his editorial
ability." Jones and Wesley had forty shares each
"as an equivalent for their capital and business
ability," but the actual cash investment then made
was only $40,000, each man putting up half. When
the paper was estabhshed in the following month the
cash investment seems to have totaled $69,000.
Jones and Wesley had already found it necessary
to increase their own investment, and to give up
some of the stock which was to have been an equiva-
lent for their business ability in return for cash.
At the outset Jones and Wesley held 25 shares each;
J. B. Plumb, Daniel B. St. John, and Francis B.
Ruggles five shares each, and E. B. Morgan and
Christopher Morgan two shares each. The Morgan

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

interest, small as it was, has a considerable place in
the Times history, for at a later crisis in the affairs
of the paper (during the fight against Tweed), E. B.
Morgan came in and bought the stock of the Ray-
mond estate, thereby giving Jones invaluable security
in his struggle with Tammany.

Raymond chose for the new paper the name of
The New-York Daily Times, which had been
borne in the thirties by a publication so short-lived
that for all practical purposes the name was as good
as new. A prospectus was already in circulation
and had been published (as an advertisement) in the
other dailies of the city. On the whole, and in-
evitably, the prospectus contained blameless generali-
ties; The Times was going to include all that was
good in both conservatism and radicalism, while
avoiding the defects of either; it announced in firm
tones its belief in the doctrines of Christianity and
republicanism, which nobody in the United States
except the Indians would in that day have denied;
and it declared the intention of the publishers **to
make The Times at once the best and the cheapest
daily family newspaper in the United States."
But along with these routine announcements there
were one or two which meant something. The
Times **is not established for the advancement of
any party, sect or person." **It will be under the
editorial management and control of Henry J.
Raymond, and while it will maintain firmly and
zealously those principles which he may deem
essential to the public good, and which are held by
the great Whig Party of the United States more
nearly than by any other political organization, its

^' ■ ---'-■-''-' - -'• - ■■'Hill

J,i^:::3;;|;||j||,::: ^ f

1^ r.iil,

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

columns will be free from bigoted devotion to narrow
interests." For a party politician and office-holder
to admit that his party could conceivably fall short
of perfection was a novelty in the fifties.

Moreover, ** while it will assert and exercise the
right freely to discuss every subject of public interest,
it will not countenance any improper interference,
on the part of the people of any locality, with the
institutions, or even the prejudices, of another."

There was a reason for this. During the summer
there had been many rumors about the new paper,
and the motive of its founders was set down as
almost everything but what it really was — to
establish a new paper that would publish, as a later
motto of The Times put it, "all the news that's fit
to print," a phrase which exactly expresses the
intentions of Raymond and Jones. It suited Ray-
mond's political and journalistic enemies to accuse
him of being an abolitionist, and the apprehensive
rivals of the new paper tried to discredit it by assert-
ing in advance that it was going to further the
doctrine of abolition, or the presidential candidacy
of General Scott, or the presidential candidacy of
some other dignitary, or anything else that might
seem likely to bring it into disrepute. The motive
of this was clear enough even at the time; for the
established newspapers made the same efforts to
hamper the circulation of The Times that had been
tried successively on The Sun, The Herald, and The
Tribune — and with no more effect. New York
was growing so fast that the extraordinary prosperity
which attended The Times almost from the outset
brought no real injury to any of its important rivals;

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

for years thereafter they all grew and prospered
together.

These attacks had given the paper a good deal
of free advertising, which was soon turned to good
account. Raymond had collected the nucleus of an
excellent staff — several reporters and editors, and
a dozen employes of the mechanical departments,
left the Tribune in a body to come over to the new
paper — and despite the unreadiness of the building
at 113 Nassau Street which had been rented as the
first home of the paper, it appeared eventually only
two days later than the date promised in the pros-
pectus. **0n the night of the 17th of September
[1851]," says Maverick, "the first number of The
Times was made up, in open lofts, destitute of
windows, gas, speaking tubes, dumb waiters, and
general conveniences. All was raw and dismal.
The writer remembers sitting by the open window
at midnight, looking through the dim distance at
Raymond's first lieutenant, who was diligently
writing brevier" [editorial copy, so called from the
name of the type in which it was set] "at a rickety
table at the end of the barren garret; his only light
a flaring candle, held upright by three nails in a
block of wood; at the city editor, and the news-man,
and the reporters, all eagerly scratching pens over
paper, their countenances half lighted, half shaded,
by other candles; at Raymond, writing rapidly and
calmly, as he always wrote, but under similar dis-
advantages.''

The first number of The Times on the streets the
following morning contained an editorial article
(by Raymond, of course) headed "A Word About

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

Ourselves," and beginning with the declaration:
**We publish today the first number of The New York
Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning
(Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of
years to come." This salutatory contained a
promise which was soon justified by performance:
"We do not mean to write as if we were in a passion,
unless that shall really be the case; and we shall
make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as
possible. There are very few things in this world
which it is worth while to get angry about; and they
_are just the things that anger will not improve."
There was rather more anger than was needful in
most of the New York papers of that period, espe-
cially in their editorial controversies with each
other. Yet it is pleasant to record that editorial
ethics in this city have shown a steady improvement.
In the earlier decades of the nineteenth century
editors were compelled by public opinion to back
up their tirades against each other by appearances
on the field of honor. By the time of Greeley and
Bennett this practise, which made an already hazard-
ous occupation somewhat too troublesome for com-
fort, was dying out, and the ethics of the period
permitted rival editors to fight out their quarrels
with walking sticks or horsewhips when they met on
Broadway, instead of taking to pistols and the Wee-
hawken ferry. And in 1851 even horsewhipping
was beginning to go out of fashion. No doubt an
argument could be made out for this custom, in
theory, but as a practical measure it did not seem
to moderate editorial passions, though not every-
body was as unconcerned as Bennett, who published

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the account of one of his own unfortunate personal
encounters in The Herald under the heading, ^* Horse-
whipped Again."

By 1 85 1, however, the traffic on Broadway had
become so heavy that it was impossible to hold it up
while rival newspaper proprietors belabored each
other with malacca sticks, and emotion had to be
expressed on the editorial page. There, to be sure,
it flourished with intensity; "vile wretch," "profli-
gate scoundrel," and "infamous reprobate" were
terms commonly employed as designations of pro-
fessional colleagues, and for decades thereafter the
newspapers gave a good deal more editorial attention
to each other's misfortunes and shortcomings than
the relative importance of the topic deserved. To-
day, aside from one or two publications whose
ethical standards are palaeolithic in other respects
as well, the newspapers of New York usually have
sufficient self-restraint to conceal their opinions of
each other, and devote such editorial reference as
they make to criticisms of specific views of a con-
temporary rather than to animadversions on its
editor's personal appearance and moral character.
No doubt this mollification of manners is all for the
best, but veteran editorial writers complain that it
has taken a good deal of the fierce joy out of the
newspaper business.

The Times was by no means wholly free from
controversies with its rivals, but except in one or
two instances it did not carry this practise so far as
was the custom, and thereby gave a pleasing instance
to New York newspaper readers of the possibility
of filling up a newspaper without recourse to the

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

material of personal quarrels. Raymond was only
once challenged to fight a duel (by an indignant
Irish patriot) and a little diplomacy got him honor-
ably out of that, i-n: 1
/ This paper which was produced under the difficult
conditions described by Maverick consisted of four
pages, of six columns each. The page was about a
third shorter and a third narrower than a page of
today's Times, There were morning and evening
editions — the latter published at one and three
o'clock in the afternoon; but there was only one
Times, Neither the office files nor the memory
of the oldest living members of the staff furnish
much information about these evening editions, but
apparently they contained merely the news arriving
after the paper went to press at midnight, with the
editorial, advertising and other features persisting
in all editions. The evening editions, in other
words, took the place of, and in time were supplanted
by, the second, third and later editions which the
improvement of newspaper mechanics presently
made it possible to issue before dayhght.

There was also in the beginning, and for years
thereafter, a IFeekly Family Times, Every daily
paper had to have a weekly in those days for circu-
lation on the farm, and in the case of The Tribune
at least the weekly was largely responsible for Gree-
ley's great influence. But with the extension of
railroads it eventually became possible to get the
daily paper circulated over a much larger part of
the country than was possible in 1851, and after a
long and respectable career the weekly edition of The
Times was finally discontinued in the late seventies.

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

A Semi-weekly Times, chiefly for rural readers, lasted
some years longer.

There was, besides, in the early days, a Times
for California, put together whenever a mail boat
happened to be saihng for San Francisco; and a
Campaign Times issued in presidential years. The
Times for California passed away with the rise of
the California press, and the campaign edition, which
was a weekly, died out for the same reason as The
Weekly Family Times,

From the beginning The Times was a good news-
paper. The first page of the first number is a good
specimen of the art of newspapermaking as under-
stood in 1 85 1 . In the first column, under the " mast-
head*' containing the terms of subscription, and so
on, is the heading, "The News from Europe."
Single-column headlines were the invariable rule
then, of course, as they were until a much later
period; and the descriptive headhne had not yet been
invented. "The news from Europe" is preceded
by a short summary, the opening lines of which
illustrate the method of obtaining foreign news in
that day:

The Royal Mail steamer Europa arrived
at Boston yesterday, at about six o'clock.
Her mails were sent on by the New Haven
railroad train, which left at 9 o'clock, and
reached this city at an early hour last
evening.

By this arrival we have received our

regular English and French files, with

correspondence, circulars, etc., to Saturday,

September 6 — the Europa^s day of sailing.

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

The news by this arrival has consider-
able interest, although it is not of startling
importance.

Then follows a brief summary of the news, and
after that the news itself, under the headings ** Great
Britain," ** France," etc. — most of it taken from
the London papers. There are some three and a
half columns of European news; then a column about
a fugitive slave riot at Lancaster, Pennsylvania;
the rest of the page is filled with brief local items,
ending with perhaps a quarter of a column from
Brooklyn. At the head of the local news is this
paragraph:

The weather was the theme upon which
we hinged an item for our morning edition,
but we have been forced to forego the
infliction of it upon the public, by the pro-
ceedings of the Boston Jubilee, which our
special correspondent has forwarded us.
Never mind, the President cannot always
be Honizing through the country, and as
soon as he returns home we shall endeavor
to do this important subject full justice.

Other local items include the announcement that
"the fountain in Washington Square gets on toward
completion with moderate speed," and reports of
the appearance of the bloomer costume in Greenwich
Village. Two or three fires are chronicled, and
under the heading of "False Alarm" The Times
announces:

The Hall bell rang an alarm at 9 o'clock
last evening for the Sixth District, but our
item-gatherer failed to discover the first
spark of a fire.

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

It must be recorded with regret that The Herald* s
"item-gatherer" did find that fire; but this did not
estabHsh a precedent. The Times's merits soon
forced its way to recognition, and the circulation
soon began to approach that of The Herald and The
Tribune. Reviewing the first year of the paper on
September i8, 1852, Raymond said that "it has
been immeasurably more successful, in all respects,
than any newspaper of a similar character ever
before published in the United States." So far as
public esteem was concerned that was unques-
tionably true, but if Raymond had stopped to
consult Jones and Wesley he might have said "in all
respects but one." The Times was not yet paying
its way. Fifty thousand dollars had been spent
at the outset for mechanical equipment. Newsprint
paper was then as now the heaviest drain on the
treasury (though, as paper, it was a good deal better
in those days); of The Times* s first-year expense
more than half — ^40,000 — was spent for paper;
$25,000 for the wages of the mechanical and business
departments; $13,000 on correspondents, editors,
and reporters. The circulation at the end of the
year was more than 26,000 — a figure highly credit-
able, in the circumstances; but the small size of the
paper restricted the space available for advertising,
rates were accordingly high, and advertisers saw
no reason for paying extra to appear in The Times
when they could reach as many readers for less
money in the Tribune, Sun or Herald.

The stipulations of the articles of incorporation
as to the division of profits were so far a mere exer-
cise in fantasy. Raymond as editor of the paper

HENRY J. RAYMOND.

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

received a salary of ^2500 a year; Jones and Wesley
had had only the privilege of putting in more money.
But with the second year The Times took the plunge
and doubled its size. It also doubled the price,
going up to two cents a copy, and the circulation at
once shrank from 26,000 to 18,000. But the extra
pages gave room not only for more advertising, but
for more news, and before long the loss in circulation
had been more than made up. In 1857 The Times
claimed a circulation of 40,000.

Jones had managed the business during the first
year, but then was constrained to take a trip to
Europe on account of his health. Wesley had
charge of the business office for some time thereafter,
but in 1853 Fletcher Harper, Jr., was installed as
publisher, having purchased some of Jones's and
some of Wesley's stock. Harper, it seems, did not
get along with the other partners, and in 1856 he
sold out to them. By that time the paper was
prospering; it appeared in some litigation in connec-
tion with this sale that the dividends were $20,000 a
year, and Jones and Wesley paid $1666 a share for
Harper's stock, the par value of a share being $1000.

Wesley sold out his interest in September, i860,
to Raymond and Leonard W. Jerome, the latter of
whom served as "consulting director" until 1870.
After Harper's departure, however, Jones had re-
sumed the management of the business office, and
the prosperity thus early established continued un-
broken, under his direction, for more than a quarter
of a century.

The Times's reputation for balance was almost
upset only three months after its establishment,

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

when Louis Kossuth came to New York to find in
America, if he could/* material aid" for the renewal
of the Hungarian struggle against Austria. Magyar-
Americans of today may be surprised to learn that
in 185 1 the Times was the principal champion in
America of the Magyar cause, but the Hungary of
1849 was not the Hungary of 1914. Raymond's
enthusiasm over Kossuth — whose reception every-
where in America was remarkably favorable, and
whose progress excited almost as much public
interest as the movements of JofFre in 1917 — was
unquestionably genuine, and sprang from a love
for the principles of liberty and nationalism, for
which Hungary had lately fought so gallantly.
Also, it must be admitted, the arrival of Kossuth
was the first big local news story after the foundation
of The TimeSy and it was necessary to show New
York what the new paper could do. As a result
readers of The Times often found that of their twenty-
four columns of news and advertising three or four
would be devoted to a speech by Kossuth (sometimes
with the postscript, "Remainder tomorrow") and
another column or so to an account of his doings.

Nevertheless, the virtual adoption of Kossuth
and Hungary by The Times was probably a good
thing for the paper. Kossuth himself, after his
return to Europe, acted for a time as London cor-
respondent; and during his stay here Raymond was
enabled to defend him — a grateful labor it must have
been, too — against James Watson Webb, whose
newspaper had taken on itself the function of advo-
cate of the Hapsburgs and Romanoffs. The conflict
between the two came to a head at a dinner given

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

by the city to Kossuth on December ii, 1851, where
Raymond had been appointed to respond to the
toast: **The Press — the organized Voice of Free-
dom — it whispers hope to the oppressed, and
thunders defiance at the tyrant." As Raymond rose
to respond to the toast and express the sentiment
of the company, Webb also rose, of his own accord.
From the editorial attitude of his paper it was clear
that he was going to whisper hope to the tyrant,
and thunder defiance at the oppressed. There was
a good deal of confusion, and Webb was finally
suppressed by the police. Raymond delivered his
speech, and then entreated the audience to hear
Webb on the other side; but Webb's remarks were
drowned by hisses and hoots, and he was compelled
to save them up and print them in his paper next day.

On another occasion in that first year Raymond's
aggressive personality brought himself and his
paper into prominence. The Whig National Con-
vention met at Baltimore in June, 1852. Like the
national conventions of both parties for years past,
it was dominated by a vigorous and truculent group
of southern leaders who were determined that
neither the platform nor the candidate should be
suspected of hostility to the extension of the "pecu-
liar institution." Fillmore was generally favored
by the southern delegates. General Winfield Scott
by the northern; with a little group of willful men
sticking to Daniel Webster.

The southerners had their way in every detail
of organization and in the writing of the platform,
but the northern leaders expected that their com-
plaisance in this respect would be met by southern

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

acceptance of Scott's candidacy. Raymond, who
was present as the chief correspondent of The TimeSy
mentioned this expectation in a dispatch to the
paper during the balloting, and added, "If Scott
is not nominated, they will charge breach of faith
on the South/' This was promptly telegraphed
back to James Watson Webb from his paper in New
York, and Webb at once gave the dispatch (which
had somewhat misrepresented Raymond's language)
to some of the southern leaders. The balloting
for a candidate was interrupted on the last day by a
demand for the expulsion of Raymond from the
convention as the author of an infamous and false
attack on the integrity of the delegates.

For Raymond was by this time a delegate, having
been chosen by the New York representatives to take
the place of a man who had gone home. At the
time this was represented as a mere accident; but it
appears to have been done with intent. Some of
the northern leaders were disgusted and ashamed
at their continual humiliations at the hands of the
southern fire-eaters; and knowing Raymond as a bril-
liant orator of unquestioned courage, they had told a
delegate from Oswego to go home and give his seat
to Raymond. The offending dispatch and the intru-
sive Webb were consequently more or less accidental
provocatives of a fight already arranged, to which
both sides were looking forward — the southerners
with confidence, the New Yorkers with trepidation.

Raymond's speeches on this occasion were a good
example of his manner. At the beginning they were
mild, conciliatory, almost evasive; he disclaimed
any intention to charge a bargain between North

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

and South; he had merely expressed his own opinion.
But then he exploded into a declaration that he
would assert and continue to assert his opinion that
if the South did not meet the North halfway its
delegates would be justly open to charge of a breach
of faith, and he, Raymond, would charge them with
it *'here and everywhere." Then he turned on one
Cabell, of Florida, a veteran bravo of the debating
platform, who had volunteered to "put the Aboli-
tionist in his place.** In a moment Raymond had
Cabell indignantly declaring to the chairman, "Sir,
I cannot, I shall not, submit to language of that
kind.'* Raymond replied, "Permit me to tell the
gentleman from Florida that when he puts words
into my mouth which I have not used, for the purpose
of founding an accusation upon me, he will submit
to whatever language I may see fit to use in repelling
his aspersions.**

It was the first time in many years that a north-
erner had dared to use such language toward a rep-
resentative of the southern oligarchy. According to
southerners present, this speech "not only annihi-
lated Cabell at the convention, but he never got
rid of its damaging effects when he got home.** And
a writer, evidently an eyewitness, who gave an
account of the episode in The Albany Evening Journal
after Raymond's death, observed:

From that hour the Whig Party assumed
a new character, and its representatives
(with a few disgraceful exceptions) a bolder
attitude. . . . Mr. Raymond's clarion voice,
on that memorable occasion, sounded the
opening notes in the death knell of slavery.

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

This incident deserves some notice for the reason
that in those early years Raymond's career was so
largely identical with the history of The Times. But
it was not altogether so. In 1854 the Kansas-
Nebraska Act had begun to split both parties at the
North, and was preparing the way for the great
organization which carried Lincoln to the White
House only six years later. Raymond was nomi-
nated for Lieutenant-Governor by the Whig state
convention in 1854 (to the great disgust of Greeley,
who had wanted the office), but he had already been
present as a delegate at an Anti-Nebraska conven-
tion, which accepted the regular nominations that
had been forced largely by its threat of secession.
The Whigs carried the state by a few hundred votes,
and Raymond ran a few hundred more ahead of the
gubernatorial candidate; but the editorial attitude
of The Times was reserved during the campaign,
and it certainly was never used to promote its editor's
political fortunes.

Two years later Raymond's friends wanted him
to become a candidate for Governor, but, as already
related, he refused. Whigs and Democrats were
uniting in the organization of a new party to prevent
the further extension of slavery, and Raymond did
not want his personality, or any recollection of old
animosities either between parties or among Whigs,
to stand in the way of that movement. The Re-
publican party, as a national organization, had been
established at an informal convention held at
Pittsburgh in February, 1856, a convention which
gave the call for the Philadelphia convention in
June that nominated Fremont. Raymond was

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

at Pittsburgh and wrote the long confession of faith
on which the RepubHcan party was estabhshed —
an able and convincing document, which showed
no sympathy with the abolitionists, but did express
the determination of moderate northerners to end
the domination of public Hfe by southern terrorism.
This declaration, some 10,000 words in length, was
telegraphed from Pittsburgh and published in The
Times, but there was little in the paper about the
doings of the Pittsburgh convention, and no editorial
comment till long after Raymond's return. In
the campaign of 1856 The Times and Raymond took
a prominent part, and from that time on for twenty-
eight years The Times stood in the front rank of the
RepubHcan journalism of the country; but whatever
neglect the institution might have been able to
charge against its editor when he strayed aside into
politics, it could never have accused him of making
the paper an instrument of propaganda or a means
to personal advancement.

Newspaper mechanics was an infant art in the
fifties, and the papers of those days of course differed
greatly in contents and make-up from those of
today. Whether all the changes have been for the
better or not is to be doubted. Considering the
conditions. The Times in the fifties was an excellent
newspaper — so for that matter were The Herald
and The Tribune. The telegraph was coming into
more and more general use, but still was something
of a novelty, and an expensive novelty. "The
latest by telegraph" was a heading apt to stand over
a column or two of brief and heterogeneous items

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

from everywhere, with most of the details coming
along later by mail.

Local news was written much more in the editorial
manner than is common today. If a reporter was
writing about a spade he called it a spade, instead of
describing it generally as an agricultural implement,
or referring the responsibility for calling it a spade
to the District Attorney. Sometimes, naturally,
he was apt to apply the offensive designation of
spade to something which was a mere trowel, and
the local news probably lost in impartiality what it
gained in piquancy. The editorial page was more
opinionated, and more violent in the expression of
opinion, than civilized editorial pages today. But,
allowing for the diiBFerent manners of the time, it
can hardly be doubted that, however primitive the
newspapermen of that time may have been, they
had a keen scent for news.

An example from the early history of The Times:
In September, 1854, the steamer Arctic was sunk
in a collision in the North Atlantic, with a loss of
several hundred lives. Rumors of the disaster had
been prevalent for several days, after the steamer's
failure to arrive had excited apprehension, but not
till the night of October loth did these rumors be-
come precise. Even then nobody could find respon-
sible authority for the report that the Arctic had
been sunk, and the night city editor of The Times,
having "put the paper to bed,'' climbed on a horse
car to go home in the early morning hours, thinking
that nothing more could be done. By one of those
pieces of good luck which do happen to newspaper-
men more often than a skeptical world believes,

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

though not so often as the harassed reporter could
desire, the editor's attention was attracted to a
befuddled passenger on the horse car who was
attempting to tell the conductor all about the terrible
disaster at sea. The conductor, no doubt, was
not so attentive as could be desired, nor was the
narrator entirely clear in thought and speech. The
editor did his best, but could overhear only a few
disjoined phrases, among which were "Herald"
and "bottle of wine." The first of these told him
where the news had gone, and the second warned
him that the prudent Herald stafF had done what
they could do to make it impossible for anybody else
to get a coherent story from their informant.

But there was another way out. The editor
hurried back to the Times building and had the
presses stopped. The Herald was already on the
press, beyond doubt; and a man from the Times
press room, in whose ability to do difficult things
everybody seems to have had confidence, was told
to go to the Herald building and get the first copy
printed. He returned presently and reported that
the Herald press room was locked up and that the
carriers who ordinarily distributed the paper before
daylight had been shut out. The Herald, having
a big exclusive story, had sent out its mail circula-
tion, but had determined to hold up the papers for
the city until an hour after all its competitors were
in the hands of their readers — when the appearance
of The Herald with this huge beat would be the more
impressive.

The pressman was promised fifty dollars if he
could get a copy of The Herald in spite of these

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

obstacles; and by means not recorded by the ancient
chroniclers, he did it. And there was the full story
of the Arctic disaster by the first returning survivor,
George H. Burns. The Times composing room
staff was hastily reassembled — no doubt some of
them were found in near-by and easily accessible
gathering places such as the vigilance of Mr. Volstead
has now abolished — and The Herald's story was
reset and injected into the first page of The Times.

The Times city edition was circulated at the usual
time the next morning, and no doubt when The
Herald appeared an hour later many worthy citizens
thought with contempt that it had merely lifted
Burns's story from The Times. The next day a
number of survivors arrived, and Raymond himself
turned reporter and put himself under the city
editor's orders for a task which, considering the
limited facilities of the day, was about as hard as
that which the Times staff confronted after the
Titanic was sunk — and which was met as success-
fully.

Maverick, in recording this episode, appears to
think it necessary to forestall criticism by saying
that of course Burns had undoubtedly given his
story to The Herald in the supposition that it would
at once be communicated to all the other papers,
and that in lifting it The Times was merely carrying
out his wishes and thwarting an iniquitous competitor.
Maybe so. At any rate, the night city editor was
raised five dollars a week, which was quite a lot of
money in those days.

The front page of a New York newspaper in the
fifties was usually devoted for the most part either

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

to telegraphic news of the doings of Congress and
the administration, or to European news, of which a
much larger amount was printed In proportion to
the size of the paper than was dreamed of in recent
years, until the war. In August, 1858, New York
was in a frenzy of excitement over the successful
laying of the first Atlantic cable, but that fragile
connection survived barely long enough to endure
some polite interchange of felicitations between Queen
Victoria and President Buchanan, and then became
unworkable. Not till almost a decade later was
permanent cable communication established, and
even in the Franco-Prussian War cable news con-
sisted of little but a collection of brief official dis-
patches and announcements, with most of the news
conveyed by mail.

In the fifties it all came by mail, and an ingenious
and elaborate technique had been evolved to get
it as quickly as possible. Correspondents of papers
and news associations in Europe sent their letters,
their digests of current happenings, and the latest
English or French papers by the last mail to the
transatlantic steamers, which were met off Cape
Race by pilot boats which took off the news dis-
patches. These were then taken ashore and tele-
graphed to New York, when this was possible;
usually only the briefest skeleton of the latest news
could be sent by wire, and the bulk of it had to
come by train. More than once The Times's dis-
patches during the war in Italy in 1859 were pub-
lished in a fragmentary condition, with the explana-
tion that a telegraph operator at some relay point
between New York and the Nova Scotian coast

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

had closed his office and gone home for the night,
leaving news dispatches to wait till tomorrow.

The news thus arriving would be headed some-
what as follows:

THREE DAYS LATER FROM EUROPE

Arrival of the ^^City of Paris'*
The New English Cabinet
And so on.

Other overseas mail correspondence to which
much space was given was the news from California,
where men who had gone to dig wealth from the
ground were preparing the way for a race which
should develop new possibilities in the exercise of the
free imagination, and from Central America, where
William Walker and his associates were valiantly
trying to repeat the exploits of Pizarro and Cortez,
and create the Golden Circle which would com-
pensate the slave states for the prospective loss of
control of the Federal government.

On the second and third pages were book reviews,
and general articles something like those now appear-
ing in newspaper magazine sections. The fourth
page, editorial, began with a summary of the day's
news, and usually included dramatic and musical
news and critiques, besides leading articles. Very
late telegraphic news was often put on the editorial
page, or the page opposite. Local news and ad-
vertisements occupied much of the fifth, sixth, and
seventh pages, and the last page was devoted chiefly
to financial and commercial news and advertising.
This is of course a generalized description, and any

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

given issue of any paper might depart considerably
from the type; but substantially this seems to have
been the idea of a good newspaper in the fifties.
And, allowing for the handicaps imposed by the
immature mechanical development of the time, it is a
pretty good newspaper even yet.

Raymond is credited with the invention of the
display headline in 1856, but ideas of display were
more modest in those days, and found sufficient
exercise within the limits of a single column. Even
in the Civil War single-column heads sufficed. The
Times on April 4, 1865, for example, told of the
capture of the Confederate capital under a single-
column head as follows:

GRANT

Richmond

and
Victory

This was in the first of the six columns; in the
last was the story of the efFect of the news in New
York, of course with its own head; and the four
columns between were filled in with a cut of the
American eagle, somewhat precariously grasping
his thunderbolts, his olive branch, and Richmond
all at the same time. Lee's surrender was dis-
played with a single-column head, and so was Lin-
coln's death— which The Times, for the guidance of
its readers, described in the top line of the head as
an ''Awful Event." On great occasions the telegraph
editor sometimes found it desirable to attract atten-
tion by beginning his head with the admonitory

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

line, "Highly Important News," but not till the
days of the Tweed ring, when The Times had the
biggest local exclusive story that had ever come to a
New York paper, did the headlines go beyond a
single column. However, display headlines, and
even descriptive headlines, are an acquired taste, as
is evident from the fact that most of the world out-
side the United States still gets along without them.
The newspapers of the fifties afforded little con-
solation to those who want to read the headlines
because they lack the time or the intelligence to
read the news; they were published for people who
had time to spend on finding out what was going on.
It may be that our generation prefers to read the
headline "Manning, Elevated to Bishop, Voices
Curb on RadicaHsm" (to select a recent example,
not from The Tm^j), rather than look into the article
in the hope of finding out exactly to what, and in
what sense. Dr. Manning was elevated, and just
how a curb may be voiced. Perhaps this preference
is natural and inevitable, an outgrowth of the spirit
of the time, whatever that is. If so, as Henry
Adams said about life, one may accept it without
feeling the necessity of pretending to admire it.

The Times was never (with the conspicuous
exception of its campaign against Tweed) a crusading
paper. It has on occasion done its share in exposing
conditions that needed correction, but it does not
select this one out of many activities of a good
newspaper as a life work. It crusaded occasionally
and mildly in the fifties, but after the time of Kossuth
it never lost its balance. In 1856, for example,

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

It gave a good deal of attention to the condition of
the streets, and seemed much encouraged when
public indignation was aroused and an attempt was
made to compel the city government to give back a
little service in return for unlimited opportunity
of peculation. They had much to learn in the
fifties; not for forty years were New York streets
to be measurably improved, and the art of snow
removal is far from perfection even yet.

In 1857 James W. Simonton, then Washmgton
correspondent of The Times, exposed a magnificent
scheme of land-stealing and corruption m connection
with the extension of railroads into Minnesota.
The affair seems to have been conducted in the
grand manner, very much as the similar enterprise
described in "The Gilded Age." The House of
Representatives was outraged in its finest sensi-
bilities by Simonton's charges that four of its mem-
bers were corruptly involved, and he was sum-
moned before a Congressional committee for proper
rebuke. By the time the committee had finished
with Simonton it had been compelled to admit that
he was telling the truth, and to recommend that the
four guilty men be expelled.

Soon after Simonton was sent across the plains
with General Albert Sidney Johnston's expedi-
tionary force against the Mormons. To the regret,
perhaps, of certain persons, among them newspaper
editors eager to show how ably they could cover a
war, Brigham Young came down as promptly as
Davy Crockett's coon. Simonton went on to
California and was lost to The Times. But another
and greater war was on hand, and The Times added

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

greatly to its prestige by its efficiency in giving the
news of the war in Italy in 1859.

Raymond covered that war himself, ably assisted
by his Paris correspondent, Dr. W. E. Johnston,
who, following a custom prevalent then and till
much later, wrote over the pen name of "MalakofF."
The most brilliant incident of Raymond's career
as a war correspondent was his eyewitness account
of the battle of Solferino, perhaps the best of many
admirable pictures of the war which The Times
pubHshed. Solferino displayed not only Raymond's
ability as a writer but his talent as a news editor.
In those days the press of the world was divided
into two classes. In Class I, alone and unapproach-
able, stood The London Times; the other newspapers
of Europe and America differed only in their degree
of inferiority — at least, in the public estimation.
A London Times correspondent was of course at
Solferino, apparently as essential a part of the
battle as the three sovereigns who honored it with
their personal attention; and Raymond knew that
when The London Times with this man's account
reached New York every editor would feel that the
definitive and decisive story had arrived. Raymond
decided not only to have as good a story as The
London Times, but to beat it to New York — a feat
which of course would have to be accomplished by
mail. Through "Malakoff's" influence Raymond's
dispatch, written among the wounded in Castiglione
while the guns still sounded a few miles away, was
taken to Paris with Napoleon's own dispatches by a
French military messenger, and given to Mrs.
Raymond, then at a Paris hotel. With it were

GEORGE JONES.

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

directions from her husband to put it on the first
steamer leaving either England or France for New
York. Mrs. Raymond seems to have been a pretty
good reporter herself, in emergencies; thirty hours
later she put her husband's dispatch on the Liverpool
mail boat with her own hands. At that moment
The London Times, whose story had come up from
Italy by the same messenger, was just appearing
on the streets in London; but it missed the New York
mail and arrived ten days after Raymond's account
of the battle had been published.

Solferino may serve as an illustration of the slow-
ness with which European news reached New York
in those days before the cable. The battle was
fought on the 24th of June. On July 7, under the
heading "The War in Italy — Advices Three Days
Later," The Times published the batch of news
brought on a steamer leaving Ireland on June 26.
The beginning of the two columns of news announced
that the steamer had been "boarded off Cape Race
by the news yacht of the Associated Press, " which
took off "the synopsis of news prepared by our
Liverpool agent." This reached St. John's, New-
foundland, on July 4, and managed to get to New
York by telegraph on the 6th. "Our Liverpool
agent's" synopsis closed on June 23, and consisted
mainly of official announcements in Vienna and
Paris that a battle might be fought, would be
fought, but had not yet been fought. Down below
all this, an inch or two above the bottom of the
column, appeared a modest item dated in Paris, on
June 25, and headed "The Very Latest by Tele-
graph to Galway." It contained Napoleon's dis-

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

patch to Eugenie announcing the decisive victory at
Solferino.

This dispatch, of course, had been mentioned in
the headUne — three or four banks below the top —
and it was handled editorially with a due sense of its
importance. The leading article was an admirable
analysis of the campaign and drew from very scanty
material inferences fully justified by the event.
But the custom of printing the news first received
at the top of the column and letting the later dis-
patches follow in chronological order had a strong
hold on newspaper tradition. Not till the seventies
did it occur to some enterprising journalist that it
might be a good idea to put the latest or most im-
portant news at the head of the column. The
next mail boat brought Raymond's and *'MalakofF's"
dispatches, which The Times published on July 12 — :
again with the first dispatch first, and the story of
Solferino trailing along toward the end. The Times
that day gave up two of its eight pages to news and
correspondence from the war. As early as 1852
it had devoted seven of its 24 columns to the news
of the final day in the famous Whig convention at
Baltimore (and this without any undue prominence
for Raymond); and in 1856 nine columns of the 48
(including the whole front page) were one morning
given up to the publication of the full text of cor-
respondence in a diplomatic dispute with England.
Whether these displays were disproportionate is a
matter of taste.

Raymond's feats, however, were not the only
source of distinction for The Times in the Italian
war. Quite as much attention was aroused by an

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1551-1859

exploit on the internal front which tradition ascribes
to William Henry Hurlburt, whom Raymond had
left in charge of the editorial page. On the morning
of July 15, 1859, this gentleman was one of a party
who saw a friend off on a steamer. The party spent
an enjoyable morning, and then Hurlburt went to
the office to write an editorial about the Quadrilat-
eral, the famous Austrian fortress group to which
the armies of Francis Joseph retired after the defeat
at Solferino. Apparently his mind wandered from
time to time — now to the cabinet crisis in England,
now to the new fortifications of Paris, and now to
the social morning just ended. The result appeared
on the Times editorial page the next morning under
the heading, "The Defensive Square of Austrian
Italy." Future sociologists of this well prohibited
republic are commended to a study of this article.

The Times proofroom was then regarded as the
best in New York, but a few days before that a
proofreader had ventured to change a word in one
of Hurlburt*s editorials, and had been ordered, with
much indignation, never to do so again. He read
this article on the Quadrilateral, and found therein
such expressions as the following: "If we shall
follow the windings of the Mincio, we shall find
countless elbows formed in the elbows of the regular
army." ... "If we follow up the course of the
Mincio, we shall find innumerable elbows formed
by the sympathy of youth." . . . "Notwith-
standing the toil spent by Austria on the spot, we
should have learned that we are protected by a
foreign fleet suddenly coming up on our question of
citizenship. A canal cuts Mantua in two, but we

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

may rely on the most cordial cabinet minister of
the new power in England." , . . "The Adige
is deep and swift at Verona; Paris is strong in her
circle of fortifications.*' Along with much else
which was plausible and often accurate.

Whereupon the proofreader remembered that he
had been forbidden to touch a word of Hurlburt's
copy, and the article was printed as written.

Next day it was reprinted as it ought to have been
written, with an apologetic note that **by a confusion
of manuscripts sent up at a late hour" a regrettable
error had occurred; which, The Times admitted, had
furnished **a happy occasion for airing a little envy,
malice, and uncharitableness to the less respectable
among the daily journals." A friend of Raymond's
reports that when he read this article in Paris, weeks
later, he "denounced it," as was natural enough;
but did not disavow it. This generosity is praise-
worthy, but it would have been rather late for a
disavowal by that time.

So by the opening of the Civil War The New York
Times (the "Daily" had been dropped from the
title in 1857) had already won itself a place as one
of the great papers of America. Also, it had pros-
pered. As early as 1855 i^ claimed the honor of
being second only to The Herald in circulation, and
by the end of its first decade nobody in the Times
oflRce would admit that it had any superior.

The original quarters were long since outgrown.
As early as 1854 The Times had begun to think of
moving, but when plans for a new home became more
definite the paper had reached such a degree of

BEGINNINGS OF THE TIMES, 1851-1859

prosperity that it was possible to build on a more
magnificent scale than could have been hoped a few
years earlier. The first Times Building — first, that
is, of those which the paper built for itself — into which
the paper entered on May i, 1858, occupied the
triangle between Park Row and Nassau and Beek-
man Streets, on the spot where the second Times
Building, erected in 1888, still stands. The growth of
the paper in recent years led to the erection of the
Times Building in Times Square, and then of the
Times Annex in West 43 d Street, which already is
uncomfortably small; and each of the four homes of
The Times has in its turn been the finest newspaper
building in the country.

The structure which seemed so magnificent in the
fifties would of course be somewhat commonplace
today, but in its time it was far superior to anything
ever built for the accommodation of an American
newspaper. For its erection a sixty per cent
assessment was levied on the stock, and all profits
above twenty per cent a year were set aside for the
time being for a building fund. The Times was
making money — enough money to justify its
owners in what then seemed to some of their con-
temporaries a rather hazardous investment in un-
necessary luxury. The five stories of the Times
Building rose to the dizzy height of eighty feet above
City Hall Park, and from the windows of the top
floor, as Maverick wrote, "the upper part of New
York is spread out before the eye in one grand
panoramic view."

CHAPTER II

Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860-1869

"O AYMOND, as has been said, seems to have been
-■-^ somewhat ashamed of his abihty, even rarer
in that day than at present, to see both sides of
a question, and felt that it sometimes gave him an
appearance of irresolution. Probably the fault was
more evident to him than to others. Certainly in
the great crisis that led up to the Civil War, and
throughout the war itself, there was nothing irres-
olute or Laodicean about either Raymond or his
paper; and the disfavor into which both fell for
a time in the early days of reconstruction was due
to the fact that Raymond happened to be right
when the majority was wrong.

The oldest living member of the present Times
staff dates his connection with the paper from some
years after the close of the Civil War. Probably
every member of the staff of i860 is dead; certainly
all the men who contributed to the formation of an
editorial policy which in all its essentials was di-
rected by Raymond himself. Present workers on
The Times may be pardoned, then, for expressing a
somewhat impersonal admiration for the manner in
which the paper met the crisis. It was firm in a
time when there was a great deal of irresolution;
but what was a rarer virtue, it saw the issues clearly
in a period when loose thinking was even more

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

general, and perhaps more destructive, than weak-
ness of will.

Raymond had no more sympathy with Phillips
and Garrison and the rest of the abolitionist radicals
of the North than with the sabre-toothed fire-eaters
of South Carolina. While some other New York
papers took the occasion of John Brown's raid on
Harper's Ferry to offer the South some words of
warning as to the constant danger of insurrection
that was an inevitable concomitant of slavery, The
Times dwelt rather on the fact that the slaves had
not joined Brown's party, and called the raid itself
the work of either ** irresponsible anarchy or wild
and reckless crime." Raymond was entirely in sym-
pathy with the moderate attitude on slavery which
was held by most thinking men at the North. He
did not admire slavery; and eventually, in the letters
to Yancey, which will be noticed below, he did go
at some length into the difficulties and dangers
which the institution might be expected eventually
to bring upon any society by which it was tolerated.
But he felt that slavery in the South, though objec-
tionable on moral and political grounds, was a
southern question; the great issue of the day was
not slavery but the slave power in politics, and the
struggle with that power was indeed an irrepressible
conflict.

In the campaign of i860 The Times was one of the
leading Republican papers of the country, and
though it favored Seward for the presidential nomi-
nation, from first to last it displayed a degree of
confidence in Abraham Lincoln that was not uni-
versal among Republicans of the East. It may be

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

supposed that in a period of such violent political
emotions and such important issues the natural ten-
dency of a newspaper to find unsuspected merits in
the candidate of its party would be strengthened;
but The Times was not content with expressing its
own confidence in Lincoln, it quoted copiously from
his speeches of the past as well as reproducing those
of the current campaign, and did its best to give
the East a proper picture of this man whom an over-
ruling providence, or the accidents of political ma-
nipulation, had set up as the candidate of the Repub-
licans. At the same time, its treatment of Stephen
A. Douglas won from that gentleman an acknowl-
edgment of "the courtesy and kindness which it
alone of the New York journals has shown me.'*

After the election, when the secessionists at last
began to put their theories into practise, Raymond
set forth his idea of the national issues in a series
of four letters to William L. Yancey of Alabama,
whom he regarded as at that time the leading spirit
in the secession movement, and who had provoked
him by a letter to The Herald. Those letters, pub-
lished in The Times during November and December,
i860, are perhaps the ablest of Raymond's writings,
and after the lapse of sixty years still furnish per-
haps as satisfactory an analysis of the underlying
issues of the Civil War as has ever been compressed
into this space. **We shall stand," Raymond wrote
in his concluding letter, published after South Caro-
lina had already seceded, **on the Constitution
which our fathers made. We shall not make a new
one, nor shall we permit any human power to de-
stroy the old one. . . . We seek no war — we

CIVIL WAR and; RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

shall wage no war except in defense of the consti-
tution and against its foes. But we have a country
and a constitutional government. We know its
worth to us and to mankind, and in case of neces-
sity we are ready to test its strength.'*

That sentiment guided the editorial course of The
Times through the turbulent winter between Lin-
coln's election and the attack on Fort Sumter.
Raymond deprecated, as all sensible men depre-
cated, any hasty aggression which might provoke
to violence men who could still, perhaps, be brought
back to reason; but he insisted that as a last resort
the union must be maintained by any means neces-
sary. To the proposals for compromise he was
favorable, on condition that they did not compro-
mise the essential issue — that they did not nuUify
the election of i860 and give back to the slave
power the control of the national government which
it had lost. Because no other compromise would
have been acceptable the issue inevitably had to
be fought out, and from Sumter to Appomattox The
Times was unwavering in its support of Lincoln and
its determination that the Federal union must and
should be preserved. Its editorial comment on
Lincoln's first inaugural address was an index of
its position in the weeks just before war broke
out. After reviewing Lincoln's program The Times
observed: "If the dangers of the hour can be
averted and the Union can be saved, this is the
basis on which alone it can be accompUshed. If the
Union cannot be saved on this basis and consist-
ently with these principles it is better that it should
not be saved at all."

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Raymond's letters to Yancey took up several
columns each, but they were worth it. The editor
of the paper certainly did not allow it to become in
any sense a personal organ; on March i, 1861, it
published an address which he had delivered some
days before on the policy of the Republican party,
but with an apologetic note that it was inserted
"perhaps to the exclusion of more interesting mat-
ter." It was as a matter of fact an illuminating
statement on the prospective course of the new ad-
ministration, from a man who spoke with some
authority — and with an authority which was to
increase from year to year. Besides directing The
Times in the war years, Raymond engaged in a good
deal of active work for the Republican party in
state and nation. He became one of Lincoln's
most valued political helpers, and in 1864 was the
chairman of the New York delegation at the national
convention. He had a good deal to do with the
composition of the platform, and was largely respon-
sible for the vice-presidential nomination of Andrew
Johnson, a gentleman in whom Raymond not only
had a personal confidence which he eventually ad-
mitted was misplaced, but whom he valued as a
representative of the Union minority in the South,
and a sort of living symbol that the Union had not
been and would not be disrupted.

Raymond was presently made chairman of the
Republican National Committee and directed the
campaign that reelected Lincoln. Unfortunately,
he also allowed himself to be a congressional candi-
date in New York City. In 1863 he had received
some votes for the Senatorship, but not enough.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

He was elected to the lower House, however, and
took his seat in March, 1865. His course, as will
be related presently, was highly creditable to his
judgment and principles, but temporarily unfor-
tunate not only for his own political repute but
for the welfare of The Times,

During the war, however. The Times made an
excellent record not only as an organ of opinion but
as a medium of the news. And the Civil War, it
is hardly necessary to recall, effected a great trans-
formation in American journalism. For the first
time in American history since the invention of the
railroad and telegraph a situation had arisen in
which the public wanted to know what had hap-
pened yesterday rather than some man's opinion
on what had happened last week. Before hostilities
had begun papers which previously had printed
not more than two or three columns of telegraph
news a day were printing two or three pages.
Correspondence by mail still existed, but was ac-
cepted only with reluctance, when nothing better
could be obtained. Even in the fifties, New York
papers, maintaining regular correspondents in Wash-
ington, could depend for news from the rest of the
country for the most part on brief telegrams to the
Associated Press, supplemented by details from the
local papers when these arrived by mail, and occa-
sionally by letters from correspondents who as likely
as not were volunteers. But by i860 every New
York newspaper that wanted to deserve that name
had to maintain a large staff of its own correspond-
ents in the southern states. Thanks to their exer-

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tions, the North knew pretty well what the South
was thinking in that critical year; and the South
might have been better off if its knowledge of the
North had been as extensive.

The work of these correspondents involved a good
deal both of difficulty and of danger. When seces-
sion came to be a fact and civil war was visibly just
around the corner, northerners in the South were
under suspicion. The hazards that attended jour-
nalism under these conditions may be illustrated by
the case of "Jasper," the Times correspondent in
Charleston. From the secession of the state until
the beginning of the war, Jasper sent every day full,
and apparently fair, dispatches giving the news from
Charleston and the sentiments of South Carolina.
The reactions of some indignant readers of The
Times were of the sort with which The Times be-
came familiar during the recent war. Honest citi-
zens felt that only news which they liked could be
true. It was assumed that because The Times
printed news which might be favorable to the rebels
it, or its correspondent, Jasper, was consequently
in sympathy with rebellion. There were demands
that this "secessionist" be no longer permitted to
spread his propaganda in the columns of The Times.
To one of these complaints The Times replied edi-
torially that "Jasper went to Charleston with in-
structions to write strictly what was true, and to
give the facts as they might fall under his obser-
vation, whether favorable to secession or otherwise."
It was added that perhaps the desirability of get-
ting his dispatches through the Charleston telegraph
office had led Jasper to take a view of some phases

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

of the situation which would be acceptable to the
Carolina censors — a consideration which ham-
pered correspondents in Germany from 1914 to 1917.
But that Jasper was doing his best to tell the truth
was evident from his later misfortunes. After he
had watched the bombardment of Fort Sumter for
several hours he was suddenly arrested as a Federal
spy and locked up in a jail which, he complained,
was fit only for negroes. A day or so later he
was released and ordered to take the first train north,
and his demand for the restoration of his watch
and pocketbook was met by the warning from the
Governor that he had better not linger in Charleston,
as the authorities would probably be unable to protect
him from the mob. Jasper finally escaped to Wash-
ington, in disguise. His experiences diflPer in degree
rather than in kind from those of any newspaper-
man who tries to tell the truth as he sees it about
a question on which there is violent difference of
opinion; but they were not unusual in 186 1. A
number of northern correspondents had narrow
escapes from lynching.

When the war actually began these men who
knew the South for the most part became corre-
spondents with the armies. Raymond, with some
assistance from the Times Washington bureau, cov-
ered the first battle of Bull Run himself. As at
Solferino, he saw most of it — or most of the ear-
Her phase of it. At two o'clock, convinced that the
victory was complete and that McDowell's army
had nothing more to do but to march on to Rich-
m.ond, Raymond went back to Washington to file
his dispatch. Returning to the battlefield toward

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

sunset he suddenly encountered much of the army
and all of the spectators in precipitate retreat. The
correspondent who had written and filed the story
of a great victory now had to set to work to col-
lect the news of a great disaster. Raymond did it;
he covered the story all over and sent a substitute
dispatch to The Times. But there was a censor in
Washington that night, and of Raymond's two or
three columns only a few disconnected and innocu-
ous sentences ever got into the paper.

This seems to have been Raymond's last appear-
ance as a war correspondent, but the men who fol-
lowed the Union armies for The Times in the East
and in the West lived up to the standard which he
had set both as a writer and as a gatherer of news.

In the sixties it seems to have been regarded as
a natural manifestation of the news instinct to beat
the other correspondents on the general's intentions
for tomorrow's battle, no matter what the injury
to the pubhc interests.

According to a rumor preserved in the army,
though not in the Times office, one correspondent of
the paper was carried away so far by his eagerness
for news, during the battle of the Wilderness, that
he was lucky to escape with being thrown out of the
camp. One night Grant and Meade, being desir-
ous of talking over in the utmost privacy what they
thought they could do to Lee the next day, strolled
out of the headquarters tent and down to a thicket
just beyond the light of the campfire. As they
were talking in low tones they heard a movement
in the bushes, and making investigation discovered
a Times correspondent lying on his belly and busily

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

noting down the strategic plans of the Army of the
Potomac. Chased away from headquarters as a
result of this, the correspondent made his way to
Burnside's corps, and hunted news so dihgently
there that he came near being shot by an unsym-
pathetic subordinate officer before Grant's leniency
permitted him to get off with a reprimand.

A more innocent and certainly more creditable
manifestation of newspaper enterprise, made possible
by the imperfect communications of those days, was
the beating of official reports by the dispatches of
correspondents. This happened with such frequency
that one suspects that a general pursuing a beaten
enemy, or trying to save the remnants of his army
from a victorious one, often thought that he might
as well wait till tomorrow to tell the War Depart-
ment what had happened to him, as they would
see it all in the papers anyhow. And The Times had
the felicity, or the prudence, to beat the official
reports only in the case of good news. Most expert
at this was Major Ben C. Truman, one of the chief
Times correspondents with the western armies.
His story of the repulse of the Confederates at Frank-
lin, Tennessee, reached The Times four days before
the War Department heard from Schofield, and five
days before any other paper had the news. He also
accomplished a notable "beat" with an advance notice
of Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea, which
luckily had no disastrous effect on the campaign.

Truman, in the opinion of some of his contem-
poraries, was the most brilliantly successful of all
the correspondents of the Civil War. But other
Times men, including George F. Williams, William

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Swinton, and Lorenzo L. Crounse, served the paper
almost as well. Swinton and Crounse were the
principal Times correspondents with the Army of
the Potomac. Crounse in particular had his share
of the risks of war which correspondents encountered
in those days much more often than in modern
times when they are allowed to see battles only
with infrequency and from a long distance in the
rear. He was wounded by a shell in 1862, and
later, with some other New York newspapermen,
was captured by Mosby's raiders, who let them go
after taking possession of their notebooks and car-
rying their news back for publication in the south-
ern papers — a fact which suggests that newspaper-
men in those days must have taken much more
legible notes than is the rule at present.

Called back from the front for a time, Crounse
served as night editor of the paper in the spring of
1864, and his vigilance prevented The Times from
being deceived by a forged document purporting to
be a Presidential proclamation appointing a day of
fasting and prayer, which was invented for its effect
on the stock market, and was actually published in
three New York papers. After this he got back to
the Army of the Potomac in time to cover the fall
of Richmond and the surrender of Lee.

But not all the hazards of the Civil War were
experienced by men in the field. The ^Snternal
front" as painfully known in recent years was one
of the great facts of the Civil War also, though
men had not then given it a name; and the internal
front in New York became in July, 1863, one of
the liveliest portions of the fighting line when the

JOHN C. REID,
Managing Editor, 1872-1889.

LOUIS J. JENNINGS.

Editor-in-Chief,

1869-1876.

JOHN FOORD,
Editor-in-Chief,
1876-1883.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

troops had all gone to Pennsylvania to stop Lee
and the draft riots broke out. Raymond was no
more afraid of rebellion across the street than of
rebellion in the cotton states. Some of the New
York papers, congenitally sympathetic not only with
the Southern Confederacy but with Tammany Hall
and the elements from which that body and the
draft riots both derived their chief support, found
it convenient as well as congenial to pat the mob
on the head. So did some of the pubUc men of the
time; the Governor of the State did not think it
beneath his dignity, such as it was, to try to con-
ciUate the rioters. But while the mob was burning
houses, plundering stores, and shooting policemen,
Raymond was writing such lines as these:

This mob is not our master. It is not to
be compounded with by paying blackmail.
It is not to be supplicated and sued to
stay its hand. It is to be defied, confronted,
grappled with, prostrated, crushed.

Warned by the misfortune of The Tribune, which
had actually been attacked by the rioters and saved
only by opportune arrival of a detachment of the
overworked police. The Times had fortified itself.

The Catling gun had lately been invented and
offered to the War Department, though it was not
used either widely or successfully in the war. Two
specimens of this gun had been obtained by The
Times, according to tradition through the President's
friendship for Raymond, and were mounted just in-
side the business office under the command of
Leonard W. Jerome. If the mob had not been more
interested in attacking those who were unable to

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

defend themselves, it would have found some trouble
waiting for it at the Times office, for the entire
staff had been armed with rifles; and there was a
third Gatling gun on the roof, mounted so that it
could sweep the streets in any direction. It is only
a malicious invention of jealous rivals that this gun
was kept trained on the window of Horace Greeley's
office in the near-by Tribune Building.

Raymond insisted that the draft was only the
excuse and not the cause of the riot.

Were the conscription law to be abrogated
tomorrow [he wrote] the controlling in-
spiration of the mob would remain the
same. It comes from sources independent
of that law, or of any other — from malignant
hate toward those in better circumstances,
from a craving for plunder, from a love of
commotion, from a barbarous spite against
a different race, from a disposition to bolster
up the failing fortunes of the southern
rebels.

Indeed, the only utterance of The Times in the
period of the riot which was in any degree ambiguous
was its editorial comment on Archbishop Hughes's
address, which managed, with evident difficulty, to
be as polite, as vague, and as noncommittal as the
utterances of the prelate himself.

Thirty-two members of the Times staff, it may be
added, served in the Union armies, and two went
south to join the Confederate forces.

Allowing for the curious taste of the time, which
dictated such practises as beginning a long series of

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

dispatches with the oldest of the lot, and burying
the latest news at the bottom of a five-column story,
the news judgment of war-time editors was pretty
good. Now and then, of course, there were excep-
tions to this rule. On November 20, 1863, for ex-
ample. The Times published an editorial article on
two remarkable orations which it printed in full
that morning in its news columns. One, which took
up two columns of the first page, was Henry Ward
Beecher's speech at the Brooklyn Academy of Music,
reporting his experiences as a propagandist in Eng-
land. The other, by Edward Everett, briefly men-
tioned in the front-page news story where it be-
longed, was pubHshed verbatim on page 2, and
took up all of it.

In its editorial comment The Times remarked:

We devote a broadside of this morning's
Times to the publication of two orations
which we are sure will command the attention
of the day, and not of this day only. The
elaborate and finished discourses of two
such men as Edward Everett and Henry
Ward Beecher, upon topics of such great
national interest as those they discuss, will
not be lightly passed over, much less
ignored altogether, by any intelligent citizen.

There was another speech in that day's news —
a speech which The Times printed on the front page
because it was part of a front-page story, and in
full — it was only two sticks long; printed in
full just after the much longer invocation by the
officiating clergyman, also given word for word, and

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

just ahead of the equally detailed list of prominent
persons present. That address was received with
applause, according to the Times report; but the
applause was certain, even if not perfunctory, on
account of the high position of the orator, and if
the news story is to be believed it provoked none
of the enthusiasm called forth by Everett's speech
on the same occasion. And as for editorial com-
ment, it was not merely lightly passed over, but
ignored altogether, not only in the Times office
but everywhere else. It was the address delivered
by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg.

The transformations which the war accomplished
in newspaper making were not confined to the de-
mand for more news, and an increase in the expense of
getting it. The public which reads the newspapers
is apt to forget that the mechanical task of getting
the news before the public is on the whole as diffi-
cult as the obtaining of the news in the first place,
and usually a good deal more expensive. The war
drove The Times to buy additional presses, and to
adopt (in July, 1861) the process of stereotyping,
which The Tribune had already tried out and without
which it would have been all but impossible to meet
the demands of a rapidly increasing circulation.
Typesetting machines were not known until much
later, and newspapermen of today may still experi-
ence a salutary awe as they contemplate the very
respectable results which their predecessors accom-
plished with such inferior tools.

On April 20, 1 861, eight days after the attack on
Fort Sumter, The Times for the first time was issued

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

on Sunday. There had long been in existence in
New York papers issued on Sunday only, as there
are in England today; but New York dailies were
driven to the issuance of Sunday editions by the Civil
War, as were London daiHes in the war lately ended.
A newspaper published seven days a week still seems
uncongenial to the English temperament; the Sunday
issues published occasionally between 1914 and 1919
did not establish a precedent. But the New York
morning papers, once committed to the Sunday
edition, never gave it up.

At first The Sunday Times was issued at the regu-
lar price of two cents. Before its first year was
ended, however, it had gone up to three cents, to
which price the daily paper followed it in 1862.
The enormously increased telegraph tolls, the mount-
ing prices of print paper, and the general increase in
the cost of everything made this increase inevitable.
In 1864 The Times ^ daily and Sunday, went up to
four cents a copy, at which price it remained for
nineteen years. During the war the Sunday paper
was virtually the same as the issue of any other
day; but it gradually came to include first of all a
considerable literary element, and then more and more
of what would today be known as magazine features;
so that long before The Sunday Times had departed
from the daily norm of eight pages it had a char-
acter which made it a sort of link between the
weekly edition, by that time passing out of favor,
and the modern Sunday newspaper with its many
departments.

The war brought increased expense, but also in-
creased circulation. On May 2, 1861, while the war

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

was still a novelty, The Times made the editorial
declaration that it had gained 40,000 in circulation
in the preceding two weeks. It may be noted that
one of the few lapses of Raymond's paper from the
standard of dignity which he set was a somewhat
unworthy controversy with Bennett at the end of
1 861 about the relative circulation of The Times and
The Herald. The Times offered to put up a forfeit
of ^2500 for the families of volunteer soldiers in
support of its assertion that The Herald's circulation
did not average more than 100,000, as Bennett as-
serted, but less than 75,000, and that The Times's
daily average was more than 75,000. Bennett,
perhaps from considerations of prudence, responded
in a manner worthy of Greeley that "the practise of
betting is immoral; we cannot approve of it." And
the consequence was the publication on the first page
of The Times of two caricatures of Bennett — the first
pictorial illustrations ever carried in the paper.
Raymond, according to tradition, was afterwards
ashamed of this, and certainly the paper which he
published was able to stand on its merits without
entering into a species of controversy in which The
Herald was much more experienced.

At any rate. The Times gained steadily in pros-
perity throughout the war, and in December of 1865
took a step which the pressure both of news and
advertising had long since made advisable — the
enlargement of its page in both directions. It con-
tinued for some years thereafter to restrict itself
to eight pages, but the pages were now seven col-
umns wide and of the present length. At that time
it was the largest paper in the United States, and

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

equal in size to the ordinary edition of The London
Times. There were pessimistic newspapermen in
1865 who thought that Raymond and Jones over-
estimated the possibiHties of their business, and
that a newspaper of such size could not be sup-
ported in New York. They soon learned otherwise.

Shortly after this, however, The Times did suffer a
serious — though temporary — setback in influence
and prosperity as a consequence of Raymond's posi-
tion in politics. Raymond took his seat in Con-
gress in the special session called in March, 1865.
The rebellion was visibly coming to an end, and the
conditions of peace and plans of reconstruction were
now the topics of greatest importance in pubHc
life. Throughout the war The Times had been the
strongest of newspaper opponents of any sort of
defeatist propaganda or of the influences working
for a peace by negotiation. It had, to be sure,
looked with favor on Lincoln's conference with the
Confederate leaders early in the year, for it knew
and trusted Lincoln. It knew that Lincoln would,
as he did, refuse to consider a compromise peace.
With the volunteer experts in statecraft (of a type
with which our generation became familiar in the
winter of 191 7-1 8) who would have made peace
by some sort of happy magic formula without set-
tling any of the questions that were being fought
out, The Times had no sympathy, but it did believe,
with Grant and Lincoln, that the southerners were
our own people, citizens of an indestructible union.
It favored the punishment — at least by exile — of
the few men whom it regarded as the fomenters of

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the rebellion; but It regarded the mass of the
southern people as led astray by its leaders.

Raymond's views had been expressed in outline
in the course of a speech at Wilmington, as early
as November, 1863. In the last months of the war
they found frequent expression in the columns of
The Times, On April 13, 1865, for example, The
Times declared that **if the people lately in revolt
choose to accept the result of the war Hke reasonable
men . . . every facility should be accorded them
for the speedy repossession of every franchise
and privilege existing under the constitution.'' It
insisted, to be sure, that we must wait and see if
they were going to accept the result of the war,
for at that time JeflFerson Davis was still at large
and there were die-hards in the South who would
have taken to the woods for a guerrilla war. But
these extremists found no support; in a few weeks
the southern armies had surrendered, the soldiers who
might have formed guerrilla bands had gone wearily
back home, and the war was at an end. By that
time, however, Abraham Lincoln was dead.

The war against secession had been won, but sup-
port of the constitutional theory of secession had
reappeared in the most unlikely quarter, among the
extreme leaders of the RepubHcan party. Thaddeus
Stevens, Ben Wade and their colleagues maintained
that the southern states had accomplished what no
northerner in 1861 would have admitted as possible
— that they had cut themselves off from the union.
Possibly Lincoln, if he had lived, would by his
great prestige have been able to beat down the oppo-
sition of these men who, before his death, had re-

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CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

solved to fight him as bitterly as they afterward
fought Johnson. Whether or not Lincoln could
have done it, the fight was left in the hands of a
President whose defects of personal character and
abiHty brought his principles into discredit; and
Raymond, who for a long time stood behind John-
son as he would have stood behind Lincoln, suffered
for his defense of the ideas which, if carried out,
would have made reconstruction something more
than an ironic euphemism.

Raymond was still chairman of the Republican
National Committee, a position which gave him
prestige sufl[icient to overcome, to a certain degree,
his newness in Congress. Before the end of 1865
he was actively opposing Stevens and the other
leaders of the radical Republicans, notably by a
speech on December 24. But already it was ap-
parent that the radical control of Congress could
not be shaken. At a public meeting in New York
in the following February Raymond undertook to
defend Johnson for his veto of the Freedman's
Bureau bill, and laid the blame for the "increase
of ill-feeling'' in the South during the past few
months to the action of Congress and to the radical
Republican press in the North. Raymond favored
the immediate acceptance of the state governments
which had been set up in some of the border states,
and he wanted above all to prevent the reestablish-
ment of the old sectional antagonism. But the ten-
dency of the time was too strong for him.

Nevertheless, he persisted in spite of repeated
setbacks, and finally took a leading part in the
"National Union Convention'* which met at Phila-

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

delphia in August, 1866, where for the first time
since the outbreak of the war men from all the
states, Repubhcans and Democrats, met to bury the
hatchet and try to lay down a program for national
reunion. Raymond had had his suspicions that this
body might not be of such a character as to com-
mand the confidence even of the moderate men in
his party; within four weeks before it met he had
in a private letter remarked that ''it looks now as
though it would be mainly in the hands of Copper-
heads." But evidently he thought, when the con-
vention actually assembled, either that this fear was
unwarranted or that his influence might counteract
the presence of undesirable members from the North.
At any rate, he composed the "Philadelphia Ad-
dress" which the convention set before the country,
declaring that "the results of the war did not either
enlarge, abridge, or in any way change or affect the
powers the constitution confers on the Federal gov-
ernment, or release that government from the re-
strictions which it has imposed."

This address and the declaration of principles
appended was on the whole a piece of reasoning
on constitutional theory not unworthy of the
author of the letters to Yancey of i860. It closed
with an enthusiastic endorsement of Andrew Johnson
as "a chief magistrate worthy of the nation,
and equal to the great crisis upon which his lot
is cast." Even then Raymond was not altogether
in sympathy with Johnson's course; he supported
the constitutional amendments which were
eventually grouped into one (the Fourteenth)
and thought Johnson unwise in opposing them.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

Raymond's only contention was that Congress had
no right to make acceptance of them a condition
of the "readmission" of any state lately in revolt.
He held that the rebellion had been, all along, what
Union men considered it in the spring of 1861 —
an insurrection and not a dissolution of partnership.
But those views were too advanced for the time.
Secession was accepted as a fact by the dominant
group in Congress, and under the stress of passion
constitutional amendments were put through by
unusual, if not absolutely irregular, methods, estab-
lishing precedents some of whose harmful effects
have been seen within recent years. Raymond Vv^as
at once furiously assailed by the majority of his
party, and was accused of having gone over to the
Democrats. He lost his place as chairman of the Na-
tional Committee for his part in the Philadelphia
convention, and the paper lost thousands of readers.
Naturally, his journalistic rivals seized the oppor-
tunity to try to turn the momentary deviation of
The Times from the majority opinion to their own
financial profit. During the war, and before it, The
Times and The Tribune had been the leading Repub-
lican papers of the nation. No doubt Raymond
and Greeley had on the whole the same ideals, as in
general they upheld the same political principles on
the great issues of the Civil War period; but their
reactions differed according to their temperaments.
Raymond, in the critical months before the war,
thought that the suspicions of the South might and
should be alleviated by certain prudent concessions
from the Republicans, and that Southerners unsym-
pathetic with secession should not be driven into

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the arms of the fire-eaters by unconsidered violence;
but he insisted that the union must be preserved at
any cost, that there must be no tolerance of seces-
sion, and that the supremacy of the Federal gov-
ernment must be vindicated. After war had begun
he never weakened in the belief that there was no
choice between complete victory and ruinous dis-
aster; that peace without victory was peace with
defeat; that the war must be fought out to the
complete vindication of the Federal authority. But
when that result had been accomplished he felt that
the interests of the nation required the speediest
possible reestablishment of real national unity.

Greeley, in the period between Lincoln's elec-
tion and the attack on Sumter, had oscillated be-
tween plaintive declarations that "the republic
could not be pinned together with bayonets'' and
insistence on immediate and violent coercive meas-
ures which might have put the government in the
wrong in the eyes of the border states. When war
had come Greeley was a pretty good barometer;
he was an enthusiast when things were going well,
but after Fredericksburg, and again after Chan-
cellorsville, he was willing to throw up the sponge;
and he had that curious conviction that peace might
be obtained by some backstairs negotiation on neu-
tral soil and suddenly presented on a platter to a
surprised nation, which while it endured furnished
valuable moral support to Lee as it later did to
LudendorfF.

But when the republic had been pinned together
with bayonets, nobody displayed more sanctimonious
horror than Greeley at Raymond's adventures in

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

conciliation. The man who was to go Jeff Davis's
bail in 1867, and accept a Democratic Presidential
nomination in 1872, in 1866 was accusing Raymond
of "acting as a Copperhead'* and of betraying the
party, because he thought that southern Demo-
crats were still citizens of the United States. The
man who, in i860, thought the South might as well
go its way, who early in 1863 was talking of ''bow-
ing our heads to the inevitable," and was looking
forward gloomily to "the best attainable peace,"
could in 1866 compare the editor of a competing
and more prosperous paper to Judas Iscariot for
standing out against vindictive punishment of the
South.

But Greeley cherished no unchristian rancor;
when Raymond was safely dead, Greeley was mag-
nanimous enough to write that "he was often mis-
judged as a trimmer and a time server, when in fact
he spoke and wrote exactly as he thought and felt."
It was true; Raymond was called a trimmer; whereas
Greeley acquired a great reputation as a courageous
moral leader. The difference seems to have been
that Greeley took a certain time off each day to
advertise his morality to the pubHc, whereas Ray-
mond was too busy reaching conclusions a year or
so ahead of the times.

A moral might be drawn from this, but it could
hardly be commended to ambitious young journaHsts.

Raymond afterward confessed that it would have
been worth $100,000 to The Times if he had never
attended the Philadelphia convention, for great
numbers of its loyal supporters promptly turned

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

away from a paper which they regarded as having
gone over to the Copperheads. As it turned out,
however, if Raymond had Hved a few years longer
it might have been worth a hundred thousand to
the paper that he had attended the convention; for
it had the result of putting him out of politics and
turning him back to give his whole attention to The
Times.

The conservative Republicans among his con-
stituents (it is perhaps needless to observe that the
terms "conservative'* and "radical'' had in the
years just after the Civil War a technical significance
entirely apart from their ordinary meanings) wanted
him to try his chances for renomination to Congress,
but in a letter dated only a month after the Phila-
delphia convention he refused. He denied that he
had changed his politics. "With the Democratic
party as it has been organized and directed since
the rebellion broke out," he assured his friends,
"I have nothing in common." But the evils of re-
newed factional strife which he had attempted to
avert were already afflicting the country, and Ray-
mond realized that he could no longer do anything
to resist them. And he observed that "a seat in
Congress ceases to have for me any attraction, or to
offer any opportunity for useful public service." It
is easy enough to say that Raymond knew he could
not be renominated; the man's whole history is
proof that considerations of this sort had nothing
to do with his decision.

The last three years of Raymond's life were of
great importance to his paper. On the chief of the
new issues following the war he had taken the un-

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

popular side, and was presently forced to admit that
he was following an unworthy leader. Johnson's
personal shortcomings were largely responsible for
compromising the cause of the moderate reconstruc-
tionists, but it may be supposed that Raymond's
personal feeling had perhaps something to do with
the fact that when The Times finally repudiated him
it was on the question of paying off the national
debt with fiat money. The paper opposed the im-
peachment of Johnson, not so much from love of
Johnson as from an estimate of the motives, and a
dislike of the methods, of his enemies. In the cam-
paign of 1868 the paper was once more able to be
whole-heartedly Republican, for its editors had a
great deal of confidence in General Grant and in
the policies which the party in that year professed.
But other new questions were arising which were
to dominate the generation after the war, and on the
chief of these Raymond set a policy which in gen-
eral was long followed. As Edward Gary, for nearly
half a century one of the principal members of the
editorial staff of The Times, wrote in 191 1:

Apart from his policy regarding re-
construction, he had marked out three lines
of discussion for his paper which were of
great and lasting importance, and which
even now . . . that paper follows with
profound respect for the sound brain and
loyal heart that set it upon them.

The first of these was the struggle against various
forms of easy but unsound money — in the sixties
and seventies the Greenback movement, and later
free silver. Its insistence on sound money was at

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

least a minor reason in The Times^s unwillingness
to see any merit in the Presidential candidacy of
Tilden, who had given it support in the most spec-
tacular fight of its history; it drove the paper to
stand for its principles behind the Gold Democratic
ticket in 1896; and it was the first ground for a
disbelief in the miraculous powers of William Jen-
nings Bryan for which other reasons in sufficiency
were soon discovered.

In Raymond's last days, also, the paper began a
campaign for reform of the tariff, a principle to
which it has been consistently loyal ever since.
David A. Wells and Benjamin F. Tracy were called
in to write special articles on this subject under
Raymond, and The Times, though beaten in its
first fight as it has been beaten in many more, began
in the later sixties a steady campaign for popular
education on this question which it may be hoped
has contributed in some degree to the more intelli-
gent views now prevalent. In spite of the genu-
flections of the present Republican Congress in the
house of Rimmon, it is possible to hope that before
long the protective tariff as the past generation has
known it will be as dead as greenbackism and free
silver.

The third of the policies which Raymond laid
down for his paper was the fight for the introduc-
tion of the merit system into the civil service — a
question on which the paper had sometimes ex-
pressed itself even in its earliest years, but which
it took up in earnest after the Civil War. During
the next two decades The Times was one of the most
insistent and persistent advocates of a reform which

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CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

finally triumphed, in principle, and which after two
decades more of obstruction by practical politicians
of the older sort is now at last beginning to be the
rule and not the exception in administration.

It was the enduring faith of The Times in all these
causes, no less than its conductors' lack of confi-
dence in a man who seemed to embody stifF-necked
opposition to most of the needed reforms of his time,
which finally led the paper to break away from the
Republican party in 1884. Raymond was always
a good Republican — best, perhaps, when he was
most completely out of harmony with the dominant
group in the party — but there can be no doubt that
he w^ould have approved of the decision which his
partner and successor, Jones, had to make in that
campaign.

Local issues, too, were becoming insistent in Ray-
mond's last years. The conduct of the New York
City government had always been a scandal, vary-
ing only in degree, but by the later sixties the city
had fallen into the hands of William M. Tweed and
the scandal was becoming unendurable. Tweed
had formed an entente, useful to both parties, with
the faction of Wall Street manipulators headed by
Jay Gould and James Fisk, Jr., which was unable
to see any need for going into the long, laborious
and expensive process of building railroads when it
was so much easier to acquire them already built.
In 1868 The Times carried on a vigorous fight against
the men who were making the Erie Railroad a name
notable even in the scandalous chronicle of that
period, and before Raymond's death there had al-
ready been threats that some of the political instru-

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ments of the Wall Street-Tammany Inner circle
might be used to attack the management of the
paper. That Raymond, if he had lived, would have
fought the ring as valiantly as did Jones and Jen-
nings cannot be doubted; and no greater tribute can
be given them than the statement that not even
Raymond could have been more successful.

The setback caused by Raymond's position In
1866 did not long affect the fortunes of The Times.
It was so good a newspaper that people did not
like to go without it, and its return to the outward
form at least of party regularity furnished an excuse
for a good many Republicans to come back to their
old favorite. Some idea of the position which The
Times held in the estimation of intelligent men at
this time can be obtained from ''The Education of
Henry Adams." Adams had known Raymond in
Washington before the war, and some of his letters
to Raymond from London had been published in The
Times, which thus may perhaps claim to have dis-
covered him as a writer. Coming back from London
with an experience which in any other country, as
he has remarked, would have qualified him admi-
rably for a post in the diplomatic service, he knew
that it was hopeless to look for anything of the sort
at a time when legations, secretaryships and con-
sulates were ranked with post offices as the reward
of political merit; so he thought that the best chance
to use his talents and realize his ambitions was In
newspaper work. But when Raymond died Adams
gave up hope; for him it was The Times or nothing.
He objected to the political views of The Tribune;
on TheHeraldy aside from other objections, he thought

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

there was no room for any important personality
but Bennett; and he disHked the "strong dash of
blackguardism" which Dana had given The Sun.
Writing for The Times, Adams could have reached
a large and influential public; as for any of the
other papers which his tastes would have permitted
him to consider, he thought that he might as well
keep on contributing to The North American Review.

Whether Adams would have been permanently
satisfied as a newspaper man may be doubted; his
case is cited here only as an incidental testimonial
to The Times' s rapid recovery from the misfortune
of 1866. Early in 1869 an offer of a million dollars
was made, and refused, for the property which had
been established eighteen years before on a cash
investment of sixty-nine thousand, ^o before Ray-
mond's death The Times had recovered all the
ground it had lost even in this department, which
Raymond himself would undoubtedly have regarded
as the last and least of a good newspaper's claims
to eminence. His own material fortunes had risen
with those of the paper; at his death he owned a
third of the stock. The salary which had been fixed
at $2500 a year when The Times was founded had
been raised to ^4000 in i860. At the beginning of
1869 this was increased to $10,000 — a huge salary
for that day — and at the same time an annual salary
of $9000 was voted to Jones as business manager.
The Times could afford it; the dividend that year
was eighty per cent.

Had Raymond lived, and kept out of politics, the
paper which under Jones's direction became more
influential and powerful than ever before, and per-

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

formed at least one public service which must rank
as one of the greatest ever accomplished by an
American newspaper, would probably have been
still more distinguished. For Raymond was only
forty-nine when he died suddenly on June 19, 1869,
two months before completing his eighteenth year
as editor of the paper. Soon after E. L. Godkin,
who had served under him, wrote in The Nation that

The Times under his management probably
came nearer the nev>^spaper of the good time
coming than any other in existence; in this,
that it encouraged truthfulness — the repro-
duction of the facts uncolored by the neces-
sities of a "cause" or the editor's personal
feelings — -among reporters; that it carried
decency, temperance, and moderation into
discussion, and banished personality from
it; and thus not only supphed the only
means by which rational beings can get at
the truth, but helped to abate the greatest
nuisance of the age, the coarseness, violence,
calumny, which does so much to drive sen-
sible and high-minded men out of public
life or keep them from entering it.

Certainly Raymond was almost the inventor of the
notion that it was possible to believe in a party, to
belong to a party, and in general to support that
party without being slavishly bound to its policies,
right or wrong; and his course in the Civil War
showed that this independence of sentiment did not
involve any weakening of energies in upholding the
truth as he saw it. In Cary's language, he estab-
lished the corporate conscience of The Times; his
successors have tried to live up to it.

CIVIL WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1860-1869

Yet George Henry Payne, in his ** History of Jour-
nalism in the United States,'' seems to think it nec-
essary to account for Raymond's '^ failure," and does
so by explaining that "a journalist can never succeed
unless he is fathering popular or moral causes."
This extraordinary statement deserves notice be-
cause it appears in the most recent book on a sub-
ject which has never yet been treated adequately,
and because Mr. Payne used to be a newspaperman
himself. Without going into metaphysical defini-
tions of success, it may suffice to say that from any
point of view Raymond was a brilliant success as a
journalist. He was certainly a failure as a politi-
cian, if failure means the inability to hold the most
powerful political position to which he rose, the
chairmanship of the Republican National Commit-
tee; but even in this sense he was a failure only
because he happened to die, in the prime of life,
a few years before the majority came around to his
view.

As to Mr. Payne's curious theories on the founda-
tion of newspaper success, it may be observed that
The Times, which its worst enemies will admit is suc-
cessful in the sense that it is widely read, influential
and prosperous, has never fathered any causes,
popular or unpopular, moral or immoral; nor have
some others of the most famous and richest news-
papers of the world. If ** fathering" was a slip of
the pen for "furthering," one may wonder what
"moral causes" James Gordon Bennett the First
ever promoted. Neither abolition nor Fourieristic
Socialism could be described as a "popular cause"
in New York seventy-five years ago, yet Horace

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Greeley made a paper which advocated one of these
doctrines, and leaned strongly toward the other,
successful in every sense of the word. Nor does this
simple definition meet the case of a newspaper which
may find prosperity in spite of the furtherance of
causes which are both moral and unpopular, or in
furthering those which are both popular and im-
moral. Whatever may be the secret of journalistic
success, it can hardly be given away to the world
as freely as Mr. Payne seems to think. The art of
making a good newspaper is somewhat more than a
mere gift for guessing what is going to be popular
and moral at the same time; and as can be proved
by the examples of Greeley, Raymond, and Ben-
nett (to come no nearer our own time) that art
may be exemplified by men who sometimes guess
wrong.

CHAPTER III

The Times and the Tweed Ring

nnHE Times had been so emphatically Raymond's
^ paper that a good many people naturally
wondered, after his death, what was going to become
of it. Raymond's partner, George Jones, had long
been in charge of the business office, and was the
ranking officer, so to speak, of those who were left.
But he had had no experience in the supervision of
editorial poKcy; his life had been spent in the business
office, and few outsiders realized how thoroughly
the long friendship and partnership between Ray-
mond and Jones had indoctrinated each with the
principles of the other. Nor did Jones have any-
thing like a controlling interest in the paper. The
Raymond estate, with thirty-four of the hundred
shares, was the heaviest stockholder; Jones had or
controlled, in 1869, about thirty. And since Ray-
mond's son, then finishing his course at Yale, was
preparing to learn the newspaper business from the
ground up, it was the general expectation that in
time he would succeed his father.

But The Times could not wait for him. On July
22, 1869, some five weeks after Raymond's death,
the three directors of the company — Jones, Leonard
W. Jerome, and James B. Taylor — elected John
Bigelow editor. It might have been supposed that
this was an excellent selection. Bigelow had for

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

years been associated with William Cullen Bryant
in the editorial direction of The Evening Post, and his
service as Minister to France had increased his
reputation and given him an experience in inter-
national politics which at that particular time was
extremely valuable. Yet his career as editor of The
Times lasted only a few weeks, and is interesting
chiefly as illustrating the fact that in the equipment
of a newspaper editor the wisdom of the serpent is a
somewhat more useful quality than the harmlessness
of the dove.

The summer of 1869 saw Jay Gould and Jim Fisk
and their associates going on from the plunder of a
railroad to the more ambitious scheme of cornering
the gold supply of a nation in which the resumption
of specie payments was still something of a millennial
dream. As is well known, they counted on the
neutrality of President Grant, who was neither a
financial expert nor a connoisseur in human wile,
and whose brother-in-law, Corbin, a friend of the
Fisk-Gould group, was generally supposed to supply
most of the financial information for the White
House.

Bigelow, who knew the President well, saw him
early in August, and as a result of the interview
wrote for The Times two editorial articles on Grant's
economic policy which were generally understood
as representing the views of the White House.
At Gould's suggestion, Corbin prepared another
editorial article, which a gentleman who was a friend
of both Corbin and Bigelow succeeded in persuading
the editor was also a reflection of Grant's opinion.
This article, headed *' Financial Policy of the Ad-

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THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

ministration, " was published in The Times on August
25. Luckily Caleb C. Norvell, the financial editor,
had seen it in proof and had suggested to the sur-
prised Bigelow that it showed evidence of a purpose
to "bull gold," presumably in furtherance of the
enterprise whose beginnings were already visible to
men in Wall Street. The last paragraph was struck
out and the article thereby rendered innocuous; but
the rest of it was published. Less than a month
later came Black Friday, when Grant shattered
the final assault of the gold conspirators by opening
up the Treasury's reserves; and shortly after that
Bigelow left The Times.

Jones was justifiably alarmed by this experience,
and was consequently forced to set himself, at the
age of fifty-eight, to learn something about the
editorial management as well as the business affairs
of the paper. There seems to have been some
surprise among newspapermen of the time when it
was discovered that Jones wanted to go on alone.
Greeley, for example, attempted to buy The Times
in the summer after Raymond's death. When The
Tribune was established Greeley had owned it all,
but he was no financier, and at the time of his death
retained only one sixteenth of the stock. This
coincidence of an editor without a newspaper and a
newspaper without an editor suggested to Greeley
the idea of buying The Times, which he seems to
have supposed would be a burden on Jones's hands.
But Jones replied that he would never sell out "so
long as he was on top of the sod," so Greeley had
to stick to The Tribune.

After Bigelow's retirement the post of editor of The

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Times, under Jones's supervision, was given to
George Shepard, who for some time had been one of
the political editorial writers. In the 1901 Jubilee
Supplement of The Times Shepard's editorship was
thus characterized: "The decorum and solid ability
which had long characterized The Times were per-
fectly safe in his hands, but sprightliness was un-
doubtedly lacking." There were those on the
paper, however, who had perhaps an excess of
sprightliness, and chief of these was Louis J. Jen-
nings, a man with a great deal of talent, a great
deal of temperament, and a character so commingled
of opposite qualities that one wonders alternately
why he did not achieve brilliant success, and how
he managed to get as far as he did. Jennings was
an Englishman, who had edited The Times of India,
served as American correspondent of The London
Times just after the Civil War, and then written
London correspondence for The New York Times.
He seems to have had an affection for the name, and
during Bigelow's brief editorship he had been added
to the editorial staff of the paper.

Shortly after Shepard took over the direction of
the editorial page, on November 25, 1869, there
was a murder in the Tribune office. Albert D.
Richardson, one of the stockholders in and contribu-
tors to that paper, was shot and mortally wounded
by a gentleman whose wife had left him for a com-
plex of reasons of which Richardson was one. Mrs.
McFarland had obtained a divorce in Indiana, her
husband having been served by publication in local
papers, and she was married to Richardson on his
deathbed. Two or three eminent clergymen signal-

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

ized their breadth of opinion, if not their literal
fidehty to the doctrines of their churches, by defend-
ing the relation as an innocent one and turning
public sympathy against the injurious husband, if
indeed it was not running in that direction already.

This was too much for Jennings's moral principles,
especially as it had happened in the office of a rival
newspaper. Despite Shepard's hesitation, Jennings
succeeded in getting into The Times a number of
editorials on this case — which indeed was cele-
brated enough, at the time, to deserve some com-
ment. Beginning with the innocuous and generally
acceptable doctrine that newspapermen had no
special privilege of seduction, he went on to ask
what else could be expected from those who had
preached the malignant doctrines of Fourier, de-
structive of family ties. This must have surprised
Greeley, who by that time had almost forgotten
his youthful adventures in Socialism, along with
other ebullient eccentricities of his earlier years.
But nothing was clearer to Jennings than that the
infection imported by Brisbane still befouled the
Tribune office, and that free love, with its conse-
quences of murder or suicide, was the natural result
of taking The Tribune editorial page seriously.

Jennings had an exceptional talent for stirring
up the animals. The Tribune presently began to
retaliate against these editorial attacks by a counter-
offensive; but Jennings being a recent arrival and
little known, its editors naturally took for their
target the respectable Shepard. After a few weeks
of this Shepard told Jones that Jennings could fight
his own battles. Shepard retired to his old position

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

as a writer of political articles and Jennings became
editor of The Thnes. In the great battle against
Tweed which soon followed Jennings was the leader
of the offensive. Jones had the responsibility, and
a heavy responsibility it v^^as; John Foord, who had
lately joined the editorial staff, handled most of the
work of analyzing political and financial evidence
that came into the hands of the paper; and equipped
with the facts exhumed by Foord, and fortified by
the knowledge that Jones was standing behind him,
Jennings put his talent for invective to a somewhat
more useful employment than annoyance of The
Tribune,

It is customary, in discussing the Tw^eed ring, to
call attention to the gradual and in the long view quite
considerable improvement in the standard of New
Y'ork municipal politics. Even in the worst scandals
of more recent periods the offenders showed a certain
regard for outward order and decency. City officials
no longer thrust their arms into the city treasury
and steal money outright, as Tweed and his associ-
ates used to do; modern peculations are measured
by thousands v^^here they stole millions, and the
unearned increment in the fortunes of certain political
leaders of today and yesterday can be traced back
to such diverse and subsidiary transactions as taking
a percentage from gamblers and prostitutes, or a
fortunate and extremely silent partnership in con-
tracting firm.s dealing with the city or with corpora-
tions dependent for franchises on municipal favor.

The percentage of honest men in Tammany Hall
is probably higher now than in the days of Croker,

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

certainly higher than in the days of Tweed or Fer-
nando Wood; and the improvement in public morals
has affected even the reform movements. They
are no longer, as they were apt to be in the forties
and fifties, about as bad as Tammany. They no
longer can be bought off by judicious distribution
of offices to their leaders, as sometimes happened
in the sixties and seventies; nor, in spite of the
recent declamations of enthusiastic Republican
leaders, are they as likely to make themselves im-
potent by divisions and quarreling as they were in
the eighties and nineties. It is perhaps a matter
for dispute whether stupidity and incompetence is an
improvement on venality, but there is no doubt
that there is a great deal of mere stupidity today
where in similar conditions even twenty years ago
there would have been corruption.

Still, when all allowance is made for these laudable
tendencies, the dispassionate observer can hardly
admit that New York would be justified in giving
three cheers for itself. Nor does the study of
a century of municipal history tend to make
converts for the philosophy of Pippa and Polly-
anna. It is a painful chronicle of alternating
indignation, apathy, and despair; if it teaches
anything, it is only the old lesson that the solution
of political problems is not to be found in changes
of political machinery. In the last hundred years
New York has tried about everything. Greater
measures of home rule have been introduced as a
desperate remedy, in the hope that centralization of
responsibility would enable the public to keep
officials up to the mark; but it was exactly such

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

centralization that made possible the enormous
steaHngs of Tweed and his confederates. In reaction
from this the city, or that part of it interested in
honest government, has from time to time thrown
itself on the mercy of the legislature, only to find
presently, not exactly that it has exchanged King
Log for King Stork, but that between storks the
one who spends stolen money at home has at least
some advantage over the one who plunders the
city for the enrichment of up-state.

In the period of Tweed's supremacy New York
had the misfortune of enduring practically all these
varieties of political experience, and for some years
each new arrangement proved to be worse than
what had gone before. The chief accomplishment
of The Times's exposure of Tweed was the breaking
of this ascending spiral. Thievery soon began
again, but on a much humbler scale and with con-
siderably more caution. And never since has muni-
cipal corruption been anything like so enormous,
or so flagrant, as in the period between 1868 and
1 871. There have been no more Tweeds; but in
view of the lessons of New York City's history, it
would be rather venturesome to assert that there
will never be another Tweed in the future.

In the fifties and early sixties the dominant figure
in Tammany Hall was Fernando Wood, but even
then Tweed was doing pretty well for himself. The
charter of 1857 had given control of the city's finances
to an elective bipartisan Board of Supervisors,
twelve in number, on which Tweed managed to
obtain a dominant position. Corruption, which had
always existed in the city government, rapidly

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

increased under the benign sway of this virtually
irremovable body, but the golden days of graft
began only with the election of 1868, when by whole-
sale naturalizations at the last minute, the voting of
cartloads of repeaters, stuffing of the ballot boxes,
and other devices now happily gone out of fashion,
Tammany elected John T. Hoffman governor of
the state and A. Oakey Hall mayor of the city.
The legislature was also Democratic by a very slight
majority; but the precarious margin could be, and
on occasion was, enlarged by the purchase of any
necessary number of upstate Republicans. Tweed
came into control of both state and city governments
on January i, 1869; his domination was ended in
the fall of 1 871. It is a tribute both to his ingenuity
and to the largeness of his view that estimates of
the amount which he and his associates stole in that
brief period range from fifty million to a hundred
million dollars. ,

To remove the possibility of inconvenient inquiry
into his doings Tweed put through the legislature
in 1870 — with the aid of purchased Republican
votes — a new city charter. In its preliminary
advertising it was proclaimed as a home rule measure;
on that understanding it got a good deal of respect-
able support; even The Times y disgusted with the
conditions that had arisen under the prevalent
system, in the beginning favored the measure. But
it presently turned out that the document was full
of jokers, and that its real effect, as John Foord
has put it, was to turn the city over to the control
of four men — the Mayor, Hall; the president of
the Board of Supervisors, Tweed; the Controller,

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Richard B. Connolly; and the president of the Park
Board, Peter B. Sweeney. Heads of departments
were appointed by the Mayor, for terms of four or
eight years, and during their terms were practically
irremovable. This alone would have been enough
for moderate men; but for good measure a provision
was thrown in that all claims against the County
of New York incurred previous to the passage of the
act should be audited by Hall, Tweed, and Connolly,
and met by revenue bonds payable during 1871.

This board met only once, and then voted that all
claims certified by the Board of Supervisors to the
County Auditor and presented by him to the Board
of Audit should be authorized. In other words,
Tweed sent his bills to the Auditor — James Watson,
one of his own creatures — and this functionary
passed them on to the Board of Audit to receive a
blanket endorsement — from Tweed. In this man-
ner some six million dollars was "audited," mainly
in connection with work done, or alleged to have
been done, on the construction, equipment and
repair of the County Court House. Some of the
claims were purely fictitious; the others were all set
down at far more than the real value of the work;
and of it all Tweed and certain of his associates
received 65 per cent at first, and eventually 85
per cent.

This was the most scandalous and the most easily
visible of the multitudinous thefts promoted by
Tweed. Others were of the familiar sort — fraudu-
lent contracts, payrolls padded with the names of
dead men, of babes in arms, or of Tammany ward
heelers who had to be supported but did not want

CHARLES R. MILLER,

Editor-in-Chief.

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

to soil their hands with work except on election
day; appropriations for the support of non-existent
institutions, huge payments to companies in which
Tweed or his friends had an interest. But the
suspicions which were inevitably aroused by such
enormous and ubiquitous peculations were slow
in taking definite form. Ostensibly, Tweed was
saving money for the city. He reduced the tax
rate in 1871, and thereby won the gratitude of tax-
payers who had become alarmed at the rapid and
unaccountable increase in municipal expenses. Just
how much the city was spending or how much it
owed nobody knew, but it was evidently a great
deal. Tweed's sudden show of economy had its
eflPect in winning support for him among the property-
owning classes, and though their suspicions were not
killed by any means, a good many respectable and
prosperous citizens had become so discouraged with
municipal politics, so wiUing to grasp at any straw
of hope, that they were pleased to adopt the policy
of the ostrich, and try to pretend that they believed
public affairs were being honestly conducted, instead
of undertaking the difficult and dangerous process
of attempting to find out.

As a matter of fact, Tweed had reduced the tax
rate by the very simple process of abandoning the
pay-as-you-go plan of municipal finance, and meet-
ing most of the claims which he and his friends
presented to the city — together with the com-
paratively infrequent bills from honest creditors —
by the issue of thirty-year bonds; while so far as
possible the demands were met by short-term ob-
ligations not funded at all. In a city containing

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

as many competent financiers as New York there
were a good many men who saw through this, but
none who dared to speak out. The man who did
dare to speak was George Jones, and under his
direction The Times began in September, 1870, a
campaign which resulted, after fourteen months,
in the complete overthrow of Tweed.

That The Times did not begin its attack sooner
may perhaps be ascribed to the influence of James
B. Taylor, who was one of the three directors of the
paper, and one of Tweed's four partners in the
New York Printing Company. The history of this
organization would alone furnish valuable matter
for reflection to political reformers, and some useful
hints to thieving politicians; but for the purposes of
this narrative it is enough to say that before the
exposure of the ring it had received some millions
of public money for very slight services, and that
Tweed's far-ranging plans looked to making it the
sole agency for the printing not only of the city,
but of the state and eventually of the nation.

Taylor had been a stockholder in The Times since
April, 1 861, and his associates evidently had a good
opinion of him, since though he held only one tenth
of the stock he was elected to Raymond's place on
the directorate. But that he would have been able
to hold back the paper forever from its assault on the
ring is a quite untenable supposition, in view of the
character of George Jones. Taylor died early in
September, 1870, and The Times' s campaign began
soon after; but for the first few months the paper
had nothing to go on but its suspicions, and Taylor's
objections could well have been, and presumably

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

were, based on the risk of commencing an attack
on the most formidable and best intrenched group
of political conspirators the country had ever known
without conclusive evidence.

It would be agreeable to suppose that similar
considerations of prudence were alone responsible
for the fact that the other daihes of the city were at
best neutral in the fight, while most of them actually
supported Tweed until his guilt was proved beyond
any question; but the record shows otherwise.
There was a reason why The Times had to fight
single-handed, except for the support of Harper s
Weekly y which in Nast's cartoons had a weapon even
more powerful than Jennings's vituperation. Enor-
mous sums were being spent for municipal advertis-
ing, most of which was quite unnecessary. A good
deal of it went to obscure publications either existing
solely for the purpose of printing public advertise-
ments, or chiefly maintained by that source of
revenue, and owned by various members of the ring;
but much of it went to the regular newspapers of the
city, and cannot be called anything but a hush fund.

For a while The Times received its share of this
advertising, which was rejected when it became
apparent that it was a hush fund. But Tweed and
his subordinates had been wise enough to see that
the city was always pretty well in arrears of pay-
ment; when The Times refused to accept further city
advertising, the city refused to pay its bill. The
Times went to court and got a judgment, but the
litigation furnished an excuse by which Mayor Hall
tried — though unsuccessfully — to explain the '' ani-
mus" which the paper eventually displayed by

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

telling the truth about the city government. In the
meantime the account refused by The Times was
turned over to The Tribune, which for some time
showed a reluctance to believe, or to publish, any-
thing reflecting on Tweed. In view of the fact that
Tweed was at that time the boss of the Democratic
party not only in the city but in the state, and was
becoming dangerously powerful in his influence on the
national leaders of the party, this is an instance of
magnanimity toward a political enemy quite without
parallel in the history of the period.

The hush fund did its work. When the other
papers said anything about Tweed, it was in his
defense. The Sun, to be sure, did make the ironic
proposal of a monument to the ** benefactor of the
people," the fund to be started by a contribution
of ten cents which The Sun professed to have received
from one of Tweed's admirers. Tweed indeed sus-
pected that Dana was not altogether in earnest, and
for this and other reasons refused to accept any such
testimonial; but a good many of The Suns readers,
as well as some historians of later days, took the
suggestion seriously.

The attack was begun by the most obvious method,
and the one most readily available in view of the
lack of any definite evidence. The Times called
the attention of its readers to Tweed's sudden and
enormous wealth, and asked where he had got it.
Again and again the paper called on the respectable
leaders of the Democratic party to disown their
associate; but just then that would have been some-
what difficult. Tweed could have disowned them
and remained a Democrat, but they could hardly

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

disown the man who had carried the state for the
presidential ticket in 1868, and who was still in
absolute control of the state organization, without
finding themselves out in the cold.

Then The Times began to ask for a little informa-
tion about the city's finances. For a year and a
half no statement of them had been published. It
was presumed that the Controller, Connolly, was
still keeping books, but they were locked away as
carefully as the golden plates of the Book of Mormon,
despite a law which prescribed that they should be
open to the pubhc. For two months the campaign
was carried on with all the vigor of which Jennings
was capable, but apparently it had little effect. In
the fall of 1870 the reform ticket — supported by
Republicans, independents, and those Democrats
who had turned against Tweed either on principle,
or because they had been excluded from the profits
that were reserved for the favorites of the inner
circle — was beaten by a handsome majority. There
was a good deal of reason to suppose that Governor
Hoffman and Mayor Hall owed their reelection
largely to Tweed's foresight in buying up a good
many of the RepubHcan election inspectors; but
whatever the reason, they were reelected.

But The Times and Harper s Weekly kept on
fighting. They kept on despite the discouragement
of the election, the evidence that only a minority
of New Yorkers took any interest in the continuous
and enormous thefts of their own money; despite
the opposition of all the other papers, which imputed
motives to The Times running all the way down
from partisan malice against the Democratic leader,

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and vindictive efforts to force the payment of the
overdue advertising bill, to accusations that the
editors of the paper had been bought. In view
of the fact that Tweed and his friends could, and
eventually did, offer a good deal more for The Times' s
silence than could conceivably be bid by anybody
for its continuance of the attacks, this was not a very
plausible accusation; but it was often repeated and
doubtless believed by a good many who had their
own reasons for clinging to their faith in Tweed.

A great many worthy citizens thought that The
Times was unreasonable and vindictive. There
was heard the complaint, since become painfully
familiar, that criticisms of the administration were
injuring the good name and the credit of the city,
and that it was the duty of all good citizens to boost
New York — and its officials. Even the reformers
of the period were silent. The Citizens' Association
had lately been formed for the promotion of higher
standards of municipal government. It was or-
ganized and intended for reform; it began as a
representative of public-spirited taxpayers, and its
president was Peter Cooper. But its secretary
was soon won over by the gift of a municipal office;
and Peter Cooper presently allowed himself to be
convinced that Tweed and his friends had stolen
as much as they could use, and that hereafter it would
be to their interest to turn conservative and save
money for the taxpayer.

If this happened to the chief reform organization
of the period, it may be surmised how easily Tweed
flattered, bribed or terrorized other respectable
citizens into giving him at least tacit support. It was

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

dangerous to oppose him — particularly dangerous
for rich men, since Tweed controlled the assessments
for taxation and could raise them to any figure that
suited him if property owners gave him cause for
hostility. And undoubtedly a good many men kept
still out of sheer apathy — the apathy begotten of
long experience with city governments each of
which was more corrupt than its predecessor, and the
conviction that even if good citizens got together
they would probably be beaten up at the polls by
Tammany thugs, or counted out by Tammany
election inspectors.

The most amazing instance of Tweed's ability
to mobilize the respectability of the city in his sup-
port is the famous audit of the Controller's books
in the fall of 1870. The Times had been calling
on Connolly to let the citizens know how much the
city was spending, and what it owed. In October
Connolly suddenly announced that he would do
so, and would submit his books to the inspection of
six of the most distinguished and reputable business
men of New York — Moses Taylor, E. D. Brown,
John Jacob Astor, George K. Sistare, Edward Schell,
and Marshall O. Roberts. Their report was pub-
Hshed on November i — just before the election —
and undoubtedly gave to many good citizens a
plausible pacifier for the disturbed conscience. For
the committee reported that "the account books
of the department are faithfully kept. ... We
have come to the conclusion and certify that the
financial affairs of the city, under the charge of the
Controller, are administered in a correct and faithful
manner."

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

As Foord observes in his "Life of Andrew H.
Green":

These names represent the foremost finan-
cial interests of their time, and no group
of men could have been selected more likely
to command the confidence of the people of
New York. Yet, at the very time they
certified to the correctness of the Con-
troller's books, those records contained the
evidence of direct thefts amounting to about
twelve million dollars, while the testimony
they bore to indirect stealing was equivalent
to many millions more.

Connolly's books, indeed, were *' correct." They
showed that thus much money had been paid to
such and such persons for this and that. When
The Times later published these records it was at
once observed that payments of several hundred
thousand dollars to individual carpenters or painters
for a month's work seemed somewhat unusual,
and that it was curious that three or four men had
endorsed all the receipts, no matter in whose names
the claims stood; but nothing of the sort seems to
have occurred to the six respectable citizens.

Their report, however, was convincing enough
to those who wanted to be convinced; but Tweed
discovered that there was one man in New York
who could not be bought off or scared off. The
Times continued the fight. Tweed did everything
he could to fight back. Two years before, when the
paper was fighting the Erie Railroad conspirators,
a Tweed-Fisk judge had suggested to the grand jury
that it had better indict Raymond and Jones; but
the grand jury did not take the advice. Now a new

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THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

course was adopted; Tweed tried to amend the
criminal code so as to give to judges — of whom he
had several in his pocket — greatly increased latitude
in deciding what was contempt of court. When
this attempt failed Tweed's agents started the story
that the land on which the Times Building was
situated, and which had been occupied before by the
Brick Presbyterian Church, had been sold under a
restriction binding it for all time to church uses.
The effort to eject the paper from its home also
came to nothing, but it gave Jones a good deal of
worry for some time.

Worse still, he had not only enemies without but
some lukewarm supporters in his own camp. Ray-
mond had been dead less than a year and a half,
but already his family wanted to get rid of their stock
in The Times. The interest of the Taylor estate
could hardly be counted as hostile to Tweed, and
merchants afraid of the ring had begun to withdraw
their advertising from the paper, which was con-
tinuing its fight in spite of the testimony of New
York's most reputable business men that the city
finances were ** administered in a correct and faithful
manner." As a matter of fact the decline in the
paper's income was not large, but it was exaggerated
by rumor, and Tweed might hope that some of the
stockholders would begin to put pressure on Jones.

It was evidently in the conviction that Jones
either would be willing or would be compelled to
withdraw from a losing fight that Tweed formed,
early in 1871, a company to buy the control of The
Times — one of the most curiously assorted com-
panies that was ever brought together for publishing

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

a newspaper, or for anything else. The science and
art of politics were represented by Tweed, Oakey
Hall, and Sweeney; finance high and low by Fisk,
Gould, and Cyrus W. Field; and the necessary
flavoring of probity and rectitude was provided by
Peter Cooper and Moses Taylor. Just what these
gentlemen would have done with a newspaper if
they had had it would be hard to say, but one thing
they would certainly have done — they would have
silenced the only journalistic critic of the ring. It
may be that sooner or later thievery on such a grand
scale would have been exposed and defeated, but
there is no certainty that anything but death would
have interrupted Tweed's activities. And, as it
happened, the final exposure by The Times came
just as the ring was preparing a new scheme, the
Viaduct Railroad, which was to begin with a theft
of five million dollars and might have gone ten
times farther before it was finished. Perhaps if The
Times had been put out of the way a champion
would have been raised up in the course of time, but
no candidates for the position were visible in 1871.
And even two or three years more might have enabled
Tweed to do as much damage to New York as could
be accomplished by anything but an earthquake and
tidal wave.

All this was plain enough to George Jones, and he
refused to sell. And since rumors that The Times
was to be bought and put out of the way had been
widely circulated, he pubhshed in the paper, on
March 29, 1871, a statement over his signature
which disposed of Tweed's hopes in that direction
for all time.

100

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

No money that could be offered me [he
wrote] should induce me to dispose of a
single share of my property to the Tammany
faction, or to any man associated with it,
or indeed to any person or party whatever
until this struggle is fought out. I have
the same confidence in the integrity and
firmness of my fellow proprietors.

Rather than prove false to the public in the
present crisis, I would if the necessity by
any possibility arose immediately start an-
other journal to denounce those frauds upon
the people which are so great a scandal to
the city, and I should carry with me in
this renewal of our present labors the
colleagues who have already stood by me
through a long and arduous contest.

After that The Times continued with redoubled
vigor, but without much more success until well
in the summer. A new reform organization was
established. It held a mass meeting in Cooper Union,
it commented upon the fact that the city debt had
gone up something like a hundred million dollars
in two years; but the masses remained unaffected,
proof of what everybody believed was not forth-
coming, and Tweed and his friends looked forward
with confidence to the time when, having stolen
everything in New York that was not tied down,
they could go on to Albany and Washington.

For the benefit of those who believe that the right
is sure to triumph in the end it may be observed
that the actual exposure of Tweed was due to an
accident — the overturn of a sleigh in which the
County Auditor, one of Tweed's most useful sub-

lOI

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ordinates, was riding. This was in December, 1870;
the Auditor died of his injuries some weeks later
and was replaced by the County Bookkeeper, and
into the Bookkeeper's office went Matthew J.
0*Rourke, a political follower of James O'Brien
in a Democratic faction on bad terms with Tweed.
Whether the actual discovery of the thefts should be
credited to O'Rourke himself, or to one Copeland, an
accountant in his office, is somewhat doubtful;
but at any rate there was an investigation of some
of the claims which proved at once what ought to
have been evident even from the most superficial
inspection, that millions were being stolen. The
evidence gathered in O'Rourke's office and later
published in The Times showed that six million
dollars had been spent for repairs on the county
courthouse (payment being authorized by Mayor
Hall and Controller Connolly), of which ninety
per cent was pure graft, and that there had been
frauds of almost equal magnitude in the renting and
furnishing of armories. This was a dangerously
large matter — too large for minor officials to
handle; but the discoveries were promptly reported
to O'Brien. In the somewhat discouraging history
of that period, when high officers of city, state and
federal governments regarded their positions as
nothing more than opportunities for grand larceny,
it is pleasant to come upon this instance of obscure
public servants, receiving modest salaries, who
apparently out of no other motive than a sense of
fidelity to their trust gave away information which
Tweed would undoubtedly have paid them a million
dollars to conceal.

102

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

O'Brien now had the facts, but it was something
of a question what he could do with them. Eventu-
ally he gave them to The Times, but The Times was
not his first choice. The transcript of Connolly's
books was the biggest exclusive local story ever
offered to a New York newspaper; but it was offered
to one newspaper which refused it. Then, reahzmg
that nobody else would take it, he gave it to The
Times, but at first would not give his consent to its
publication. Knowledge of the facts fortified The
Times in its denunciation of the report of the six
respectable citizens, and eventually O'Brien's reluc-
tance disappeared.

By the time he gave his consent for the publi-
cation of the evidence Tweed had found out what
was going on. He had failed to scare Jones out
or to freeze him out; now there remained but
one recourse, to try to buy him. One afternoon
in the early summer of 1871 a lawyer with whom
Jones was on friendly terms asked the pubhsher to
come to his office for a business consultation.
When Jones entered he found to his surprise that
only one man-^ was in ■ the room — Controller Con-
nolly; and Connolly promptly came to the point
and oflFered Jones five million dollars to suppress

the news.

"I don't think," Jones remarked, *'that the devil
will ever bid higher for me than that." Connolly
seems to have taken this as encouragement, for he at
once added: ''Think of what you could do with
five million dollars! Why, you could go to Europe
and live like a prince."

Thereupon Jones made his refusal unmistakable,
103

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and Connolly went away sorrowing, for he had great
possessions.

But before entering on a fight which with the
publication of the evidence would become a death
struggle Jones felt it desirable to make his own
position somewhat safer. The Raymond family
still wanted to sell its stock. Undoubtedly that
stock could have been sold to Tweed, and the fact
that it was not, directly or indirectly, is proof enough
that though the Raymonds were getting out of The
Times they were still loyal to its interests. But
Jones was afraid that somehow Tweed would get
control of this stock; and while it would not give
him a dominating influence on the paper, it would
enable him, by alleging that the interests of the
stockholders were being injured by the campaign,
to start litigation which could have given one of
Tweed's pocket judges an excuse for appointing a
receiver. Jones had to make sure that the Raymond
share could be counted on the right side; and he
found invaluable support in E. B. Morgan of Aurora,
N. Y., who had owned two shares of stock when The
Times was founded, had aided in the financing of
the building project, and had recently taken a more
vigorous interest not only in his property but in the
fight which Jones was making against Tweed. On
July 8 The Times published a long digest of some of
its evidence relating to frauds in the rental of armo-
ries, and in the succeeding days there were repeated
editorial attacks on the ring and promises of greater
exposures to come. But Jones was not ready to go
on till he had fortified his position, and that was
soon done. On July 19 the editorial page of The

104

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

Times began with a short statement to the effect
that the thirty-four shares of Times stock held by
the Raymond estate had been purchased by Morgan,
who would thereafter be associated with Jones m
the management of the paper. The statement
continued :

It has been repeatedly asserted that the
Raymond shares were likely to fall into the
possession of the New York ring, and it is in
order to assure our friends of the groundless-
ness of all such statements that we make
known the actual facts. The price paid in
ready money for the shares in question was
$375,000. Down to the time of Mr. Ray-
mond's death the shares had never sold for
more than $6000 each. Mr. Morgan has now
paid upward of $11,000 each for 34 of them,
and this transaction is the most conclusive
answer which could be furnished to the
absurd rumors sometimes circulated to the
effect that the course taken by The New York
Times toward the Tammany leaders had
depreciated the value of the property.

Immediately following this was a double-leaded
editorial headed "Two Thieves," in which Jennings
threw his hat into the air with a loud and joyous
whoop and declared that evidence which The Times
was about to publish would prove that at least two
of the four leaders of the ring were criminals. Of
these gentlemen, one eventually escaped conviction
by flight to Europe and the other by grace of a hung
jury; that both were what Jennings called them
nobody has ever seriously doubted.

The next day The Times pubUshed another long
lOS

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

analysis of some of its evidence, this time relating
to the furnishing of armories. This article, like its
predecessor, was written by John Foord, and v/as
accompanied by a fiery editorial by Jennings. And
on the 22d The Times opened up with all its bat-
teries. When it came to the evidence afforded by
the Controller's books as to the money spent (os-
tensibly) on the new court house, the figures them-
selves spoke more forcibly than any summary or
any comment — those very figures which had
been audited and approved by the six respect-
able citizens. The previous articles had been pub-
lished on the editorial page, running over into the
page opposite; and even on the 2ist the front page of
The Times had begun, in the usual style, with a
single-column head, "General News."

But on the 22d The Times published a chapter
of figures from the Controller's books on the front
page, in broad measure, and under a three-column
head. So far as can be ascertained this was the
first time a real display heading had ever appeared
in The Times, but the editors felt apparently that
the facts they had to set before the public deserved
the aid of all the resources of the typography of the
period. Jennings's editorial accompanying the first
chapter of the accounts also employed full-face type
for emphasizing some of the figures, and the small
capitals in which then as now the names of individuals
appeared in editorials were also used for some of
Jennings's epithets, such as scoundrels, swin-
dlers, THIEVES and other terms which he
evidently felt were synonymous with some of the
personal names mentioned.

io6

THE FOURTH TIMES BUILDING,
PARK ROW,

1888-1905.

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

That editorial demanded immediate criminal
prosecution of some of the city officials, and it con-
tained the observation, fully justified by the condi-
tions of the time, that "if the public does not come
to the same conclusion before we have finished our
extracts from the Controller's books, then facts
have lost their power to convince, and public spirit
must be regarded as dead."

The facts were convincing enough. It appeared,
for example, that for carpets in the courthouse
enough money had been paid out to cover City
Hall Park three times over with the finest carpet
that could be bought in New York. A single car-
penter, according to the books, had received more
than $360,000 within a month for his work in repair-
ing a courthouse which was not yet finished. Of course,
the carpenter never got it. Whatever the name in
which the bill was made out — and the assurance
of the ring may be gauged by the fact that one of
the city's creditors was put down as "Philip F.
Dummey" — the checks given in payment were
indorsed by members of a few firms in which Tweed
and some of his accomplices were partners. Al-
together, the Controller's books fully supported The
Times^s editorial assertion that a man v/ho had a
bill of $5000 against the city for work honestly
done could not get it paid until he raised it to $55,000,
with the balance going by one means or another to
Tweed and his friends.

Readers of The Times were allowed one day to
think over the first chapter from Connolly's books,
and on the 24th another followed. There was
still another before the end of the week, and on

107

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Saturday the 29th all the evidence, with some
editorial comment, was put into a special four-page
supplement. This document was printed in both
English and German; for the German-Americans
at that time were a much more distinct racial group
than at present, and one which furnished valuable
aid to municipal reform. But, for various motives
of which partisanship was the most worthy, the
German-American press had hitherto given its
support to Tweed; so The Times let the Germans
read the evidence in their own language.

It had been announced beforehand that two hun-
dred thousand copies of that supplement would be
issued — a wholly unprecedented edition for a New
York paper in those days. As a matter of fact the
edition ran to 220,000, and a few hours after the
presses had stopped it became apparent that this
had not begun to meet the demand. The presses
started again, and for a whole week were run con-
tinuously, except when getting out the regular
issues of The Times, in printing the famous supple-
ment. Altogether more than half a million copies
were issued. The people of New York now had the
proof; it remained to be seen if they were capable of
defending themselves.

At first the ring was confident enough. Tweed's
famous comment, '*Well, what are you going to
do about it?" epitomized their reaction to the ex-
posure. Mayor Hall seemed to think that he could
meet the accusations by declaring that the papers
were "surreptitiously obtained from a dishonest
servant," and it says a good deal for the standards
of the time that the charge of dishonesty against

108

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

the man who had exposed the theft of millions by
city officials was seriously received by a large part
of the public. Hall further remarked that the
animus of The Times could be found in the delayed
payment for the advertising contract already men-
tioned. Neither he nor anybody else made other
reference to the story told by the figures than an
occasional remark about "alleged records" or "garbled
accounts."

All over the country the revelations made by The
Times were the chief topic of news, and of editorial
comment. Only in New York City did the news-
papers appear to know nothing about it. Greeley,
to be sure, who belatedly remembered that he was not
only a moral man but a RepubHcan, ventured to
suggest that Tweed and his associates might sue
The Times for libel, a procedure which The Times
earnestly invited; but the other papers did not even
by this much dignify the disclosures with any com-
ment that might be twisted into an admission that
they amounted to anything. The papers of London
and Paris published long editorial comments on
New York politics, but the New York papers seemed
to see in them only what Mayor Hall called them,
"the gross attacks of a partisan journal upon the
credit of the city."

Nevertheless, the public, or a part of it, was
awakened. The claims, it will be remembered,
which were authorized by the Board of Audit
and which, it was now apparent, contained anywhere
from sixty to a hundred per cent of pure graft
were to be met by the issuance of revenue bonds
payable during the year. For two years there had

109

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

been no statement of city finances. As Foord
writes, ** Nobody save the men in power and those
in their immediate confidence knew at what figure
city bonds were being negotiated, or at what rate
the debt was increasing/' The first consequence
of the revelations was the sudden and very natural
refusal of bankers to lend any more money to an
administration which was getting no one knew how
much, but pretty certainly was stealing most of
what it got. And there, for some weeks, matters
rested. Public indignation was steadily rising as The
Times brought out more evidence; most of the tax
money had been spent, and the city could no longer
borrow money; municipal employes were not
getting their pay. Already the summer of 1871
had seen one serious riot, when several hundred
members of an Irish mob which had attacked the
Orangemen's parade had been shot down by militia,
and it seemed that this might be only a beginning.
Now mobs of unpaid laborers gathered every day
in City Hall Park; and Tweed and his friends, with
the aid of his newspaper supporters, were trying with
some success to transfer the blame for the shortage
of city money from the thieves to the reformers
who had exposed the thefts. And while there was
not much money left in the city treasury, there was
no guarantee that Tweed and his friends would not
steal what little had escaped them. For they
calmly refused to resign, and under the Tweed
charter they could not be removed.

On September 4 there was a mass meeting of
citizens in Cooper Union, with former Mayor William
F. Havemeyer presiding, and a committee of seventy

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

was appointed to investigate the frauds and prosecute
the criminals. But Tweed and his friends were not
asleep; immediately after this meeting there was a
"robbery" in the Controller's office. The vouchers
which would have furnished evidence that no jury
could have disregarded were taken out of the glass
case which had been thought sufficient to protect
them, and it was later found that they had been
removed, and burned, by a Tweed official. Some-
thing desperate had to be done, and John Foley,
a prominent figure in reform movements of the time,
did it. Bringing suit as a taxpayer, he got an injunc-
tion on September 14 restraining the Controller
from paying out any more mone^^ on claims against
the city.

This meant that not only the fraudulent claims
could not be paid, but the honest claims of contractors,
the wages of laborers, even the wages of the police.
If the four chief conspirators had had the courage
to hang on and wait for the inevitable riots, it is
possible that they could have escaped with no other
punishment than the compulsion to be a little more
moderate thereafter; for the rioters would un-
doubtedly have turned their attention to The Times
and the reformers before going on to the more
profitable investigation of the stores of Broadway
and the residences of Fifth Avenue, leaving the
homes of Tweed and his friends untouched under
their guards of *' shoulder hitters.'' But luckily
the conspirators lost their nerve, and then came one
more proof of the famihar fact that the principal
advantage of the forces of law over the criminal
classes lies in the absence of honor among thieves.

Ill

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Mayor suggested to Controller Connolly that
inasmuch as his administration had been somewhat
discredited by the voucher theft, he had better
resign. Connolly rightly thought that resignation
just then would be taken as confession, and he also
concluded that Tw^eed, Hall and Sweeney had de-
cided that somebody would have to be thrown to
the wolves. Being in some perplexity, he asked
the advice of Samuel J. Tilden and William F.
Havemeyer, with whom he had been associated
in the more respectable activities of the Democratic
party; and they promptly told him that he had
better appoint Andrew H. Green as Deputy Con-
troller and turn over the office to him. There were
few men in the city who knew more than Green
about the city government, and none who was more
certainly above suspicion. Connolly took the ad-
vice, and Green's appointment on September i6
marked the beginning of the end of the Tweed ring.

In the second phase of the fight The Times had
more assistance, for reform was beginning to become
not only fairly safe, but somewhat popular. But
it was also less spectacular, and Green's tenure of
office took the form of a long trench war against all
forms of corruption, intimidation, and chicanery.
The Mayor at first refused to recognize the appoint-
ment, and then tried to turn him out; the office had
to be guarded by armed men. Under the injunction
the Deputy Controller could pay out no city money,
and the funds left in the treasury were not sufficient
to meet the interest on city bonds which would be
due in six weeks. While valid claims were being

112

THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

sorted out from the mass of fraudulent charges no
pay rolls could be met, and the danger of riot dis-
appeared only very slowly and gradually. Before
it disappeared The Star, a paper which had received
a good deal of money from the ring, published the
home addresses of Jennings and Jones, with a hardly
veiled suggestion to city employes whose families
were starving that these men were responsible for
the stoppage of wages. When The Times made
some comments on this The Star had the hardihood
to declare that not The Star but The Times was
inciting to riot — by trying to prevent Tweed and
his friends from collecting what little was left.

Not all the new^spapers of the city attempted to
stir up riots, but virtually all of them were hostile
to Green's administration of the city finances. The
reason was simple enough; among the bills which he
refused to pay until their validity had been certified
were those for newspaper advertising. In conse-
quence of this the man who actually put a stop to
the thefts and brought the city finances into as near
order as was possible after two years of wholesale
brigandage — who had borrov>^ed money on the
strength of his own reputation for integrity to meet
immediate and unavoidable obligations, at a time
when he had no legal authority to make commit-
ments in the name of the city — who eventually
saw that all honest creditors got their money, and
that as little as possible was paid out for suspicious
claims, had to fight through the greater part of his
term of office with practically no newspaper support
except from The Times.

Green had the hardest and most thankless part
"3

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

of the work; even of the papers which still opposed
him some had begun before election day to denounce
Tweed and all his doings except those by which
the papers stood to profit. The investigations of
the Citizens' Committee and Mr. Tilden's study of the
accounts in the Broadway bank, showing how the
stolen money was divided, had driven some of the
more timorous members of the Tweed combination
to seek foreign parts; and it was clear that if the
election went against Tweed the ring was broken.
And it did go against him. Tweed's own district
sent him back to the State Senate, but almost all
of his candidates elsewhere were beaten; and The
Times jubilantly asserted that the result '^justifies
our confidence in the capacity of the people, even in
large cities, for self-government."

That was a long time ago; men had not learned
then that though St. Michael may slay the dragon
on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in
November, that old serpent will probably be crawling
about as vigorous as ever by the middle of June.
The Tweed ring, to be sure, was broken, and the
consequences of the prosecution were fairly typical
of what has happened in a hundred similar cases in
American municipal history. Because Tweed was
the chief offender, because the evils of his time had
become embodied, in the popular imagination, in his
person, he was pursued with vigor through a long
and tortuous career of indictments, hung juries,
convictions, prison terms unduly shortened b^^
technicalities, flights to California, Spain, and Cuba,
rearrests, civil suits, and finally commitment in

114

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THE TIMES AND THE TWEED RING

default of payment of a judgment to Ludlow Street
jail, where he died. Of the other principals in the
ring all in one way or another escaped jail; a few
minor personages were convicted and locked up,
and of the numerous millions stolen from the city a
few hundred thousand dollars was recovered. And
that was all.

Three years later the Tammany ticket once more
swept the city. To be sure, it was a somewhat
deodorized Tammany. It was ruled by Honest John
Kelly, and its ticket contained so considerable an
infusion of respectable men that it might be a matter
of some doubt whether the tiger was a black beast
with yellow stripes or a yellow beast with black
stripes. But it was the same old tiger, and before
long it was up to the same old tricks. In view of all
this, municipal reformers may be excused if they
occasionally become faint with weariness and the
heat of the day; if they wonder whether their efforts
really serve any useful end but their own personal
pleasure, and incline to suspect that while they
may be hedonists, they are certainly not utilitarians.

Nevertheless, experience has shown that this same
prematurely triumphant Times editorial was accu-
rate when it said that **the theory that government
is only organized robbery has received its death
blow." No other administration has ever been so
bad as that over which Oakey Hall presided and
which was ruled by Tweed. Even the vs^orst govern-
ments of later decades did give the city some value
for at least a good part of the money spent, and there
has never been any parallel to the astounding rob-
beries committed under the guise of repairs and

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

furnishings for the Tweed courthouse. Reform
movements are bolder now; they have behind them
something of a tradition of occasional victory.
They are no longer beaten before they start; they
need no longer fear that there is serious danger of
voters being terrorized by mobs of gangsters, or
of regularly elected candidates being counted out.
That a majority of the residents of New York City
still prefer a bad government to a good one might
be assumed from election results now as ever, but
some of them change their minds occasionally, and
the minority which wants a decent administration
no longer stays away from the polls from sheer
hopeless conviction that it could accomplish nothing.
No city administration of these times could dream
of attempting to conceal its accounts from the
public; and certainly no future Tweed, if there shall
ever be any, would find that respectable newspapers
are willing, as they were in 1871, to eat the bread of
infamy and earn the wage of shame.

For these ameliorations, such as they are, no
single man can claim the credit. They are the work
of many public-spirited men working through many
years. But no one man has contributed so much to
this improvement as George Jones.

116'

CHAPTER IV

National Politics, 1872-1884

^r^HE victory over Tweed was such a success as
-■- no American newspaper had ever scored before.
It raised the prestige of The Times to a height that
had been unheard of even in the most prosperous
periods of Raymond's editorship, and gave it a
world-wide renown ecHpsing that which The Herald
had won by its lavishness and eccentricities, while
establishing it solidly in the favor of friends of good
government in the United States. In the year after
Tweed's fall The Times received still further acces-
sions of influence and prosperity through the defec-
tion of The Tribune from the Republican party. At
that time, only seven years after Appomattox, par-
tisan animosities burned with a fierceness such as
Americans of a later generation can hardly realize,
and even in the case of newspapers which as pur-
veyors of the news were as good as The Times and
The Tribune, a large if not a predominant part of
the constituency valued the paper as a political
organ rather than as a vehicle of information. When
Greeley split off from his party and accepted a
presidential nomination not only from the Liberal
Republicans but from the Democrats, The Tribuiie
suffered as The Times had suffered in 1866, and
considerably more. In 1872 The Times could and
did advertise itself as "the only Republican morn-

117

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ing paper in New York," and the support of the
faithful flowed to it accordingly^ Its influence in
the early seventies v^as greater than it had ever
been before, and its prosperity may be judged by
the fact that some of its stock sold in 1876 at fifteen
times the face value.

Yet the prosperous and powerful Times of the
seventies had a circulation only about a tenth of
that enjoyed by The Times today. Evidence for the
entire period is not available, but in the fall of 1871
— at the height of the campaign against Tweed,
just before the election in which The Times led the
reform forces to victory — the circulation never ex-
ceeded 36,000. The circulation of the supplement
with the extracts from the Controller's books is,
of course, an exception, and now and then on the
morning after election the paper might have shown
a higher figure; but on the whole it may be said that
the leading RepubHcan paper of the East at least,
if not of the entire United States, in those years of
prosperity sold anywhere from 31,000 to 35,000
copies a day.

It would be interesting to learn just what was the
true circulation of The Times's contemporaries.
Whatever it may have been, it was certainly not
what they asserted. But statements of circulation
fifty years ago belonged to the field of relativity
rather than of conventional mathematics, and the
circulation managers of that day have long since
gone to face the final audit of the Recording Angel.

And even on this small circulation The Times paid
regularly a dividend of eighty, ninety, or a hundred
per cent on its capitalization of ^100,000. There

118

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

was no reason why it shouldn't have paid dividends.
Salaries were lov/er, as were living costs. The ex-
pense of news getting was still very moderate.
During the later months of 191 8 The Times often
had a bill for cable tolls of ^15,000 a week, but in
the seventies $15,000 would have paid the cable tolls
of all the New York newspapers for a whole year.
And while the circulation of daily papers was not
large, most of them had weekly editions; and the
ethical standards of the time permitted papers to
allow the national committees of the great parties,
in presidential years, to buy and distribute the
weekly edition by the hundred thousands. That
source of revenue has disappeared with the disap-
pearance of weekly editions, and with the spread
of a newer conception of newspaper ethics for which
the present management of The Times may per-
haps claim some degree of credit. A similar im-
provement has led to the exclusion of certain kinds
of advertising which in the seventies were regarded
as unobjectionable.

It may be observed that the business conscience
of The Times in the seventies was notably higher
than that of some of its contemporaries. By all
the standards of the time, its prosperity was well
deserved, as was its political influence. Neverthe-
less, there was from the first a certain insecurity in
this lofty position — an insecurity due to the char-
acter which Raymond had given The Times from its
very first number; indeed, even from that pros-
pectus which had promised that it would be free
from "bigoted devotion to narrow interests." For
there had been a painful degree of truth in Oakey

119

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Hall's observation when The Times first published
the figures from Connolly's books, that such an
eminent Republican newspaper might be able to
keep itself busy investigating the corruption in its
own party. To the scandals which flourished in
Washington, invisible to the somewhat too long-
sighted eye of President Grant, the editors of The
Times could not be blind; and seeing them they
could not fail to condemn them, even though their
Republican principles made them sometimes delay
such condem.nation rather too long in the hope that
the party would do its own housecleaning. Unfor-
tunately, the party was not so minded; and The
Times, which had always maintained a measure of
independence unusual in its day, was compelled on
occasion to express itself with a frankness which
met with disfavor from more extreme partisans.

So the chief interest in the history of The Times
in the thirteen years between the overthrow of
Tweed and the campaign of 1884 lies in the struggle
of its editors, continually more difficult and finally
hopeless, to reconcile their principles with their
party allegiance. To one who studies the evidence
of that struggle in the columns of the paper for
those years there is apt to be suggested the simile
of a loyal wife doing her best to get along with a
scandalously dissipated husband. The Times had
not exactly married the Republican party to reform
it, but it did what it could to bring the party back
to the strait and narrow path, and without success.
Its reproaches were dignified; they never sank to
the level of nagging; perhaps, indeed, they were too
dignified to be effective, as The Times' s readiness to

120

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

believe In the reformatory intentions of its errant
partner was certainly too complaisant. But at last
the connection became unendurable, and under the
final affront of the nomination of Blaine The Times
walked out of the party and slammed the door.
After that it would have taken a miracle of miracles
to bring it back.

When the Liberal Republicans met in 1872, The
Times saw in their convention a strange assort-
ment of well-intentioned but impractical doctrinaires,
and of practical politicians who were disappointed
because their rivals had crowded them away
from the trough. That reform was needed The
Times did not deny, but it could not see that it
was likely to be accomplished by these gentlemen.
And when the Cincinnati convention nominated
Horace Greeley, the paper which had known Greeley
and enjoyed his hostility for twenty years had no
further occasion to seek for any concealed merits in
the Liberal Republican organization. Greeley's at-
titude toward Tweed had weakened his standing
as a reformer; and when he permitted the Demo-
crats to accept him as their candidate the paper
which Greeley had so fiercely denounced, only six
years earlier, for favoring a policy of reconciliation
with the South could hardly place as much faith
in his sincere desire for better things as perhaps it
merited. Persons so violently and assiduously sin-
cere as Greeley in a variety of contradictory causes
can hardly expect to be understood by their fellows
who are less gifted in moral fervor and metaphysical
tergiversation. In view of the standards of news-
paper controversy prevalent at the time, it says a

121

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

good deal for the editors of The Times that they
confined their attacks on Greeley to his poHtical
views and affihations, and did not drag out the old
scandal of Fourierism and free love.

Yet The Times did not deny during that cam-
paign that something had to be done. On October
29, 1872, in the course of an editorial devoted chiefly
to the prediction that the reelection of Grant in the
following week would mean the disappearance of the
Democratic party, there appeared this observation:

With the exception of one or two un-
founded flings or insinuations at the present
administration, there is nothing in the Cin-
cinnati platform [Liberal Republican] to
which any Republican will not heartily
assent, nor on the other hand is there any-
thingin the platform adopted at Philadelphia
[by the regulars] to which any supporter
of Horace Greeley can take exception.

However, it could well have seemed to honest and
patriotic men in 1872 — and indeed it did seem to
several millions of them — that it was safer to
give the Republican organization another chance.
Though The Times was at that time probably
the strongest and most influential Republican
paper in the country, though its editors could have
solidified their position and made still more certain
their prosperity by becoming an out-and-out party
organ, they did not fail in the succeeding years to
denounce the misdeeds of men in Washington, even
when close to the administration.

As a collector and distributor of news, too. The
Times maintained in the early seventies the high

122

KDWARD GARY.

Associate B^ditor.

1S71-1917

JOHN NORRIS,

Business Managrer,

1900-1911.

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

standard of past years, and often surpassed it. The
cable was now working at last, though its capacity
was small. The Franco-German war had seen the
first use of its facilities for the transmission of im-
portant news, and even then only two or three col-
umns a day of condensed bulletins and official
statements had come in this way, with the mails
bringing the detailed accounts of the defeats of
the French army, the heroism of the Defense Na-
tionale, the fall of one empire and the rise of
another.

The Times covered that war thoroughly and well.
If it was somewhat outshone by The Tribune^ it had
an honorable excuse; for The Times in 1870-71 was
giving up a good deal of its space, and of its energy,
to attacks on Tweed, while The Tribune had no in-
terest in this particular field of the news. Great
domestic news stories of the period were also han-
dled exceptionally well. In the case of the fires at
Chicago in 1871 and Boston in 1872 The Times gave
more than a page on each of the first two days to
stories of the disaster, and at the time of the Boston
fire issued special editions through the afternoon
of Sunday while the fire was at its height.

Much of the credit for the excellence of The Times
news service at this period must go to John C. Reid,
who came to the paper in 1872 and served for seven-
teen years thereafter as managing editor. He was
one of the greatest news editors of the time, a
pioneer of the new age which has seen the news
department take over a good deal of the predomi-
nance which formerly belonged to the editorial page.
Under Reid, The Times performed in 1874 and 1875

123

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

a feat without parallel in New York journalism up
to that time, the reporting in full of the court pro-
ceedings in the suit of Theodore Tilton against the
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher for alienation of Mrs.
Tilton's affections and misconduct with her. Edi-
torial comment, at the time and later, suggests
that the editors of The Times did not have that
complete faith in the reverend gentleman's inno-
cence which was entertained by his congregation,
and the prevalence of doubt in the community was
suggested by the eventual disagreement of the jury.
But they handled the news with full appreciation of
its value. Each day's story began with a **lead"
of two columns or so, followed by a complete steno-
graphic transcript of evidence and argument, the
whole sometimes taking up as much as three pages
in what was by that time a twelve-page newspaper.
It was an expensive proceeding, but it was a great
achievement in giving the public the news.

No doubt a good many readers of The Times
thought that the paper was giving an undue amount
of space to this chronicle of sin and suffering. Those
complaints come in often enough even in these days
from readers who appreciate the paper's general
reluctance to display news of this sort, and wonder
why a good general rule should occasionally be vio-
lated. But there was a reason in the Beecher case,
as there has usually been a reason in similar affairs
since. Dr. Beecher was one of the most prominent
clergymen in the country; there was a natural curi-
osity as to whether he was practicing what he
preached. One of the counsel at the trial declared
that "all Christendom was hanging on its outcome."

124

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

Full reporting of its course was not a mere pandering
to vulgar curiosity, but a recognition of the value
of the case as news.

But always in the background was the horren-
dous ghost of Republican corruption and misgov-
ernment, a ghost which refused to be laid and
which was every now and then uttering hollow
groans such as could not fail to be heard by the
editors even of a good Republican paper. General
Grant's second administration failed to be that
Saturnian reign which The Times had hoped in 1872.
The great panic of 1873, though no doubt a natural
reaction from the violent expansion just after the
Civil War, provided a background of economic dis-
satisfaction for political discontent. A bad busi-
ness kept getting worse, and it was becoming
apparent that the country might not be willing
to wait much longer for the often-deferred reforms
within the party. And a warning, strong and
unmistakable, was given by the election of 1874
when the Democrats recaptured the House of Rep-
resentatives, and elected governors in a number of
states, including New York.

Looking back from the vantage point of half a cen-
tury later, one is compelled to admit that The Times
seems to have been somewhat unjust to Samuel J.
Tilden, whose great accomplishments in exposing and
prosecuting members of the Tweed group had won
him the Democratic nomination for the governorship
in 1874. Th^ Times felt that Tilden had only
climbed on the band wagon of reform when it had
become safe to do so. During the early and critical

125

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

days of the struggle against Tweed, before the pub-
lication of the Controller's accounts, Tilden had
given The Times no help; but neither had anybody-
else except Thomas Nast. And it could not be de-
nied that the beginning of the end had come when
Connolly turned over his office to Andrew H. Green,
on Tilden's advice and insistence. This alone would
have given Tilden an honorable place in the gallery
of reformers, and his later services in analyzing the
accounts of the Broadway Bahk which showed the
disposition of the plunder, and in forcing the im-
peachment of the worst of the Tweed-Fisk judges,
had been of great and enduring value. Against this
The Times could set off his tolerance of Tweed be-
fore the exposures, and of the undoubted fraud
which had procured the Democratic victory in the
state and city elections of 1868. Tilden had kept
his eyes shut when they should have been open;
but he was not the only man who did that in the
gilded age. He had opened them at last, and opened
them quite as widely as the eyes of The Times were
open toward similar misconduct in the Republican
party. He was in pretty bad company before 1871,
and when he accepted the support of Kelly in 1874.
But a politician who wanted to keep out of bad
company in those days would have had to climb
to the top of an ivory tower and pull his ladder up
after him.

When Tilden was nominated for the governorship
The Times had given cordial enough recognition of
his ability and character, and its opposition to him
during the campaign was directed only against his
associates. Indeed, Tilden suffered like many re-

126

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

spectable candidates from the distrust of some of
his supporters; and he set an excellent precedent
by showing very promptly that he was his own
master. Unlike many of the western leaders of his
party, he was a sound-money man. He was as firm
against Tammany as ever. And presently he un-
covered, prosecuted, and broke up the bipartisan
ring of canal grafters which had for years past main-
tained pleasant and profitable relations with admin-
istrations of both parties. The Times gave Tilden
hearty support against the canal conspirators, and
at the same time it was compelled to condemn the
scandalous abuses which had been disclosed in Wash-
ington, abuses not only ignored by the national
administration, but oftentimes actually shared in by
men more or less close to the throne. In 1875 the
prospect of the coming elections was enough to dis-
courage any honest Republican. A Democratic
governor of New York was sending political crooks
to jail without caring what party they belonged to,
while a Republican president of undoubted personal
integrity was blindly standing by his friends, and
every week or so brought some new evidence that
his friends were profiting by his confidence.

The men who managed the Federal government
behind the respectable figure of Grant could neither
learn nor forget. The Times was compelled to repeat
that the third-term movement was folly; that there
was no reason for breaking an old and sound prece-
dent for the sake of a man whose executive abilities
were obviously not of a class with his military talents.
The third-term movement eventually subsided, to
rise again in later years; but with its subsidence came

127

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the growth of the probabihty that James G. Blaine
would become the Presidential candidate. And most
of the editors of The Times wtre convinced that Blaine
would not do. Reform was needed, was demanded;
and it would be an insult to the country to pretend
that Blaine was the man to bring it about.

By giving expression, even with due caution, to
these opinions, The Times had by the beginning of
1876 fallen pretty well into the bad graces of an
administration which on the whole it had supported
much more steadfastly than that administration
deserved, and dissatisfaction with The Times^s in-
dependence led to another scheme to take the paper
away from George Jones, whom the friends of the
administration regarded as chiefly responsible for The
Times's unwillingness to exculpate a thief merely
because he was a RepubHcan. Jones was the larg-
est stockholder, but he was not a majority stock-
holder. He had been saved from a similar attempt
during the fight against Tweed by the opportune
assistance of E. B. Morgan, but in 1876 he had to
save himself. And, unfortunately, he had enemies
within the office. Louis J. Jennings, the editor-in-
chief, whose Republicanism was of a more blazing
and reckless type than Jones's, entered into a plan
with certain Republican politicians affiliated with the
Grant administration to get control of the paper and
make it a real organ of the party. Apparently they
had some support among the stockholders; and the
ten shares belonging to the estate of James B.
Taylor were now on the market and might be used
to solidify the control of The Times in the hands of
Jennings and his friends.

128

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

But on February 4, 1876, it was announced that
Jones had bought the Taylor stock, thus becoming
for the first time owner of a majority of the shares.
The price paid for Taylor's ten shares was $1 50,000,
and this fact had become known in financial and
newspaper circles. Rivals of The Times, unwilling
to admit that this represented the real value of the
stock, had circulated the report that part of the
price represented "back dividends," or that it had
been unduly inflated by bidding up against the
friends of Jennings. It was also said that The
Times had spent ^40,000 in reporting the Beecher
trial; if so, it got it all back in increased circulation.
At any rate, Jones took the occasion of the announce-
ment of this purchase to deny all these rumors, and
to inform the public that in 1875 The Times had
paid a dividend of $100,000, or 100 per cent of the
par value of its stock. At that rate $15,000 a share
was a reasonable enough price.

Further the announcement informed The Times
readers that

at no time during the last fifteen years [that
is, since the beginning of the Civil War]
has the paper paid a less dividend than 80
per cent on the original capital, and in
some cases the dividend has been 100 per
cent. During the same period the entire
indebtedness on The Times Building and
property has been paid off, and the paper
is now in the satisfactory position of owing
no one anything.

It was added that the circulation was larger than
ever before in The Times' s history.

129

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The conspiracy being thus defeated, and Jones
left in unhampered control of the paper, Jennings
resigned in the following month and went back to
England, where he became a member of Parliament,
and passed his later years in the writing of books
about the joys of the rural pedestrian. One of the
illustrated papers at the time celebrated Jennings's
departure by a cartoon which represented Jones
standing on the roof of the Times Building and
administering to his late editor-in-chief a kick which
had sent him clear across the Atlantic, so that he
might be seen in the distance dropping on the sod
of Great Britain. Jennings had made many ene-
mies in New York, who were glad to see him go;
but it must be said that this scurrilous caricature
somewhat unduly simplified and dramatized the
transaction.

John Foord, who had made his reputation by his
work on the Connolly books, succeeded Jennings as
editor and held that position until 1883.

So The Times came into the campaign of 1876 still a
Republican paper, but a paper with a shade of inde-
pendence unpleasing to true zealots of the party. It
was a campaign in which the paper played a very im-
portant part, and in whose outcome one of its execu-
tives, acting on his own responsibility and outside of
office hours, had a part which was probably decisive.
The Times' s attitude toward both the threatened nomi-
nation of Blaine, and what many have always be-
lieved to have been the election of Tilden, has been
the subject of some misconception and of a certain
amount of interested misrepresentation. The ac-

130

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NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

count which follows is based upon office tradition
and the recollection of surviving members of the staff,
together with a study of the files of the period.

If Blaine, whom The Times had shown to be
clearly unfit for the Presidential chair, had ac-
tually been nominated in 1876, there would un-
doubtedly have been some beating of the breast in
The Times office, but the balance of probability seems
to indicate that the paper would have supported him.
But the Mulligan letters disabled Blaine for the time
being, and the convention set a precedent by select-
ing a respectable gentleman from Ohio, who was not
handicapped by a record, bad or good. The Times
supported Hayes with an enthusiasm undoubtedly
enhanced by the memory of what had so narrowly
been escaped, and attacked Tilden with a bitter-
ness which can be explained only by the combination
of an honest conviction that he was the less desirable
candidate with a deadly fear that he was going to
be elected. The sentiments of the editors concern-
ing the great issues of the time, when those issues
could be separated from questions of partisan pref-
erence and personal hostility, may be read in an
editorial on November 10, headed "Republican
Responsibilities." This was two days after the
election. The first awful sinking of heart that had
come with the early returns on election night had
passed away; latest returns — at least Republican
returns — from the doubtful states indicated victory;
and it was not yet apparent that the Democrats
would be unsportsmanlike enough to object to any
measures by which the Grand Old Party that had
saved the Union might find it necessary to perpetu-

131

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ate its beneficent sway. Two days after the elec-
tion Republicans could speak their honest feelings
with a freedom that would have been unsafe before
and afterward, and in the editorial of that day The
Times denounced the carpet-bag governments, and
declared that the party would not have had such a
narrow squeak if its leaders had paid attention to
the popular demand for reforms in the civil service
and the national finance. That editorial of No-
vember lo, in fact, is a sound and well reasoned
Democratic campaign document.

The Times' s news service during the campaign was
full and able. It was, unfortunately, dominated by
political prejudice; but to a large degree that was
the rule in those days, and though political corre-
spondence was full of vituperation of the enemy.
The Times was generally first with the news, good or
bad. Something must also be allowed for the tem-
perament of John Reid, the managing editor. Reid
had served in the war and had spent some time
in Libby Prison. According to an office tradition,
a Virginian who had known him before the war ob-
served as he was entering: "There goes John Reid.
He'll never come out alive." Unfortunately, Reid
overheard him, and upon coming out alive he trans-
ferred his resentment from this lone rebel to the
entire Democratic party. Whatever weight may be
given to this legend, Reid's partisanship was cer-
tainly rather exceptionally bitter even for those days,
and was reflected to some degree in the news columns
of The Times.

The paper had had a number of political corre-
spondents in the South, and its readers were pretty

132

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

well informed of the conditions likely to surround
the election. It was a time of bitter feeling, a trial
of strength between the reviving forces of southern
self-government and the carpet-bag administrations
which saw themselves facing a long postponed and
heavy accounting. The result of the polHng at any
given point would pretty obviously turn on the
question whether the Ku Klux would keep the
negroes away from the polls or the regular army
would keep the Ku Klux away from the polls. On
both sides were very earnest men, so firmly con-
vinced of the eternal justice of their purpose that
they felt that the end legitimized any means that
might be necessary. So the election of 1876, all
through the South, could be accurately described,
in Clausewitz's famous phrase, as "the continua-
tion of politics by other means.*'

Early reports from all sources on election night
indicated that Tilden was winning. But early reports
on election night do not always, though they do gen-
erally, furnish an accurate forecast of the result, as
is evident from the recent example of 1916. The
other papers conceded the election of Tilden — even
The Tribune, which was trying to atone by excess of
zeal for its heresy of 1872. But the first edition of
The Times — which went to press at a considerably
later hour in those days than is now customary —
began with the headline: "A Doubtful Election."

And it was a doubtful election, some of the
states being still claimed by both sides, with that
pertinacity which campaign managers exhibit when
they have any excuse at all. The first-edition
editorial contained the statements that the re-

133

; HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

suit was still in doubt and that both parties had
''exhausted their full legitimate strength," to-
gether with some observations on Democratic elec-
tion methods in New York City and in the South,
"where there is only too much reason to fear that
they have been successful." Then some analysis of
the electoral vote, conceding most of the South to
the Democrats and ending in the conclusion that to
elect Tilden the Democrats would have to carry, of
the states where the contest had been hardest. New
York, New Jersey, and either Oregon or Florida.
New York they had beyond dispute; at the time of
sending the edition to press the result in New Jersey
was uncertain; Oregon had not been heard from;
and Florida was claimed by the Democrats.

The final election extra, which went to press at
six o'clock in the morning, contained the same state-
ments as to the doubtful result. New Jersey was
conceded to the Democrats; Oregon was claimed for
the Republicans. The tabulation assigned 184 votes
to Tilden and 181 to Hayes, including Oregon, Louis-
iana and South Carolina, with the four of Florida
still in doubt; and the editorial ended with the state-
ment that, "if the Republicans have carried that
state, as they claim," Hayes would win by one vote.
John Bigelow, in his life of Tilden, saw a deep and
dark significance in the fact that ungenerous refer-
ences to the Democratic shotgun tactics in the South,
and the fear that they had been successful, had been
removed from the editorial in the last edition.
Having been a newspaperman once himself, Mr.
Bigelow might have appreciated the fact that some-
thing had to be taken out in order to insert the tab-

134

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

ulatlon of the vote by states, which appeared in the
last edition and not in the first, while still leaving
the article of approximately the same length.

It will be seen that the essential differences be-
tween the first and last editions consist in the ascrip-
tion of Oregon, previously not heard from, to the
Republicans, the substitution of a Republican as-
sertion of victory in Florida for the Democratic
claim made in the earlier edition, with the final re-
sult set down as doubtful, and the transfer of Louisi-
ana and South Carolina from Tilden to Hayes.

Any number of profound and elaborate explana-
tions have been offered for these changes, as well as
for TheTimes^s assertion that the result was doubtful.
One story, first published in The Sun in 1887, was
that Zachariah Chandler, chairman of the Republican
National Committee, and William E. Chandler, who
seems to have been a sort of deckhand and general
roustabout for that body, sent a message to The
Times in the early morning hours instructing the
paper to "claim Louisiana, Florida, and South Caro-
lina at all hazards, through thick and thin.*' Aside
from the fact that The Times was not under the
orders of these gentlemen, this story is disposed of
by the circumstance that at that time Zack Chandler
was asleep in his room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,
and probably troubled by nightmares, while Wil-
liam E. Chandler was just arriving by train from
New Hampshire, and reading in The Tribune of the
great Tilden victory.

More widely circulated, and more generally be-
lieved, has been the tale that The Times would never
have thought of casting any doubt on the election

^35

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

of Tilden if Abram S. Hewitt, chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, had not incau-
tiously sent a message to the office, toward morning,
asking what figures The Times had from Louisiana,
Florida, and South Carolina. According to this ver-
sion, Reid decided that if the Democratic National
Committee didn't know what had happened, it might
still be possible to save the sinking ship; a point
of view which certainly Reid did impress on Zack
Chandler after the last edition had been put to bed.

But in supposing that this message had a decisive
influence on The TimeSy some chroniclers of the epi-
sode have forgotten that a newspaper office on elec-
tion night receives news from other sources than
national committees. It is true that about mid-
night Hewitt sent to The Times office to ask what
majority the paper was conceding to Tilden, and
Reid defiantly answered, "None!" As the first edi-
tion show^s, the other editors were not quite so posi-
tive in their confidence; but at least this fact pretty
well refutes the allegation that when the first edi-
tion went to press The Times had no doubt of the
election of Tilden.

The other message, asking for The Times's figures
from the doubtful states, did indeed come in from
the Democratic headquarters — not from Hewitt,
but from Arthur Pue Gorman — between editions;
and it did undoubtedly gladden the heart of John
Reid. But its influence on the men who declared in
the final edition that the election was in doubt was
only subsidiary. That the Democrats had no news
of glorious victories in the doubtful states was a
fact to be taken into consideration, but along with,

136

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

and subordinate to, the other facts which had come
into the office in the telegraphic dispatches of early
morning.

The truth is, in the words of an article printed in
The Times on June ii, 1887, that

on the morning after the election of 1876
The Thnes had the news — which no other
paper in the United States had, and which
the Republican National Committee did
not have. It obtained it through its own
enterprise and sagacity, and it paid for it.

And the news was that the result was still in doubt.

When the last edition went to press that morning,
there were present in The Times office John Foord,
the editor-in-chief, George Shepard and Edward
Cary, political editorial writers, and John Reid, man-
aging editor; besides Charles R. Miller, the present
editor of the paper, who was then at the telegraph
desk, and labored under the added handicap of
being the lone supporter of Tilden in a company
whose other members were all Republicans. The
editorial council passed upon the news.

What was the news? Oregon had been heard
from. An Associated Press dispatch from Portland,
by way of San Francisco, reported that the Republi-
cans claimed the state by a majority of five hundred.
That was the only news from Oregon, and it is the
sort of news which has been accepted provisionally,
in default of better, in every newspaper office in
the country on every election night. Florida was
still in doubt. An early morning dispatch from
Augusta, Georgia, said that the Democrats claimed
Florida by a small majority; a dispatch from the

137

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

same place just before midnight had said that **both
sides claim the state." If Reid's enthusiasm carried
the council out of line, it was in the weighing of
those two dispatches.

South Carolina had been put by The Times in
the Republican column. An Associated Press dis-
patch from Charleston at 2:15 a.m. said that the
election was very close, and that it seemed probable
that the Republican Presidential ticket and the
Democratic state ticket would win. An earlier mes-
sage from the same source said that the Democrats
claimed the state by four thousand, but that the
result depended on some of the coast counties which
could not be reached by telegraph. A special dis-
patch to The Times from Columbia reported that
the Republicans had probably carried the state by
10,000, and that the Republican state committee
claimed it by from 15,000 to 20,000.

Louisiana The Times also assigned to Hayes. A
message from the chairman of the Republican state
committee declared that the state had gone Repub-
lican by six or eight thousand; an Associated Press
dispatch from New Orleans said that the Democrats
claimed the state by 20,000, "the best informed
moderate Republicans" by 4000; but that the re-
turns were "meager and insufficient for an accurate
estimate."

This was the evidence. It certainly seems that it
offered reasonable ground for thinking that the elec-
tion was still in doubt; and if the Democratic Na-
tional Committee itself was not informed as to the
result in some of the doubtful states, that fact hardly
justified news editors in giving them ofF-hand to the

138

TIMES SQUARE,
WORLD SERIES BASEBALL CROWD.

^ Brown Bros.

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

Democrats. In The Times Jubilee Supplement the
chief influence in making this decision was assigned
to Edward Cary, who was certainly not a bigoted
RepubUcan, and who could hardly be suspected of
much sympathy with the sort of methods that might,
and presently did, commend themselves to Zack
Chandler.

To working newspapermen who know upon what
slender grounds election night estimates are some-
times made up, and how generally these hazardous
estimates are justified by the event, the decision of
The Times editors will arouse little of the suspicion
that was drawn upon this transaction by the pro-
ceedings of the Republican leaders in the following
weeks.

Undoubtedly, The Times incurred unwarranted
suspicion on this occasion from the enterprises sub-
sequently undertaken, motu proprio, by its manag-
ing editor. But when John Reid left The Times
office at daybreak on Wednesday, woke Zack Chan-
dler out of his troubled sleep, and presented that sur-
prised but delighted statesman with his own analysis
of the election returns, he was acting as an unter-
rified Republican and not as managing editor of The
Times. The paper can hardly be held responsible
for the telegrams which he presently dispatched to
Republican leaders in the doubtful states, over
Chandler^s signature, containing such pointed sug-
gestions as "Don't be defrauded" and "Can you
hold your state?" Those telegrams were charged
to The Times because at the telegraph office where
Reid filed them the Republican National Committee
had no charge account. In the circumstances, Mr.

159

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

John Bigelow's indignant comments on the conspir-
acy in The Times office are somewhat beside the
point. But then Mr. Bigelow, besides having a very
real ground for indignation in the proceedings which
eventually put Hayes in the White House, had per-
haps, through the unhappy though innocent experi-
ence with the gold corner which ended his career as
editor of The Times y acquired a somewhat exaggerated
impression of the susceptibility of the paper to the
schemes of conspirators.

Thursday's paper began with the joyful heading,
"The Battle Won," and contained the declaration that
Florida was Republican by 1 500 or 2000. But it must
be confessed that the dispatches on which this was
based all came from Republican campaign managers,
and it requires no very fantastic imagination to see
in them the prompt response to the messages which
Reid had dispatched in the name of Zack Chandler
on Wednesday morning. Thereafter the paper stuck
to its guns; it believed honestly that Hayes had been
elected and it said so. Newspaper custom of the
period did not require that the election night's news
should contain any statements from the authorities
of the opposition party, or any account of the man-
ner in which the opposition candidate received the
returns. On Wednesday The Times had published
a dispatch from Columbus on Hayes's reception of
the news, but not till Friday did it notice the Demo-
crats at all, and then only to denounce as fabrica-
tions some assertions of the "outrage mill, other-
wise the press bureau of the Democratic National
Committee, which continued to maintain the he-

140

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

retical opinion that Tilden had been elected. On
Saturday an editorial headed, *'Let the Count Be
Honest" expressed approval of Grant's ordering
regulars to the disputed states, and echoed his
statement that it would be infinitely better for the
party to lose the election than to win a victory
"tainted by the suspicion of fraud." There can be
no doubt that the man who wrote these lines was
quite as sincere as when he went on in the next
paragraph to declare that an honest count would
show that Hayes was elected.

The editors of The Times could see no merit in the
proposal of an electoral commission. To The Times
it was indubitable that the President of the Senate
alone had the right to count the votes as received
from the states, and that the two Houses had no
more privilege in the matter than any other spec-
tators. There was a good deal of force in The Times' s
criticisms of the electoral commission. Proposed as
a method for reconciling the conflicting claims of the
two Houses of Congress, it was easily reducible in
fact to the shifting of the whole burden of decision
to a single Justice of the Supreme Court. Not
without reason The Times observed that it would be
simpler, and equally fair, to let Tilden and Hayes
cut for the high card; and the paper's disapproval
of the measure as bringing the Supreme Court into
politics was entirely justified by the event.

It appears, however, that objections to the elec-
toral commission were based in some degree on the
fear that some of its Republican members would
double-cross Hayes. The Times was obviously re-
lieved when David Davis, who was expected to be-

141

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

come the nonpartisan fifteenth member of the com-
mission, resigned his seat on the supreme bench to
go into the Senate, but it did not breathe easily till
the first of the cases from Florida had been decided.
The Times editorial the next day expressed regret
that the decision had been reached by the partisan
vote of eight to seven, but the explanation was easy:
"Not one Democratic Senator, not even one Demo-
cratic Justice, could be found impartial enough to
sustain the decision which was finally reached*' —
by the eight Republicans.

Though for some of President Hayes's policies The
Times' s praise could be only damningly faint, it
supported him vigorously when it could in his ef-
forts to improve the standard of public service, and
it found reason for jubilation in at least one event
which happened during his administration — the
resumption of specie payments. The Times had
fought so steadily and vigorously for the maintenance
of sound principles of national finance and currency
that it could see in this one more sign that hope for
better things in public Hfe was not wholly illusory.

One effect of Hayes's conduct of the Presidential
office was to give The Times a higher opinion of his
predecessor, and when the campaign of 1880 came
in sight the paper gave some encouragement to the
movement to bring General Grant in for a third
term. But this support seems to have been due
largely to the returning fear of Blaine, and lack of
confidence in some of the other competitors for the
nomination. At any rate, when the Republican con-
vention nominated Garfield The Times gave him

142

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

hearty support. If the statement that he was
"strong in his freedom from intrigue to gain the
nomination" hardly seems as indisputable after forty
years as it did when it was written, The Times 'j ap-
proval of his soundness on financial issues was as
creditable to him as to the paper. And if the edi-
torial on the civil service plank in the RepubHcan
platform was compelled to admit that the party
leaders were against any reform in this direction, the
editors could soothe their suspicions of the Grand
Old Party by turning their eyes to the familiar spec-
tacle of the iniquitous opposition. News dispatches
from the Democratic convention were full of such
violent denunciations and such bitter sneers as
would not now be likely to appear even in editorial
criticism of the opposition party. When Hancock
was nominated The Times called him "a pretentious
blockhead," *'an inflated Franklin Pierce," and
remarked that the convention had "nominated a
Northern General to resurrect a Confederate gov-
ernment." Hayes, to the great dissatisfaction of
The Times, as well as of a good many northern Re-
publicans who were not yet certain that the South
was back in the Union, had withdrawn the Federal
troops from the southern states, and it was evident
that this election could not be won either before or
after the counting of the vote by the methods that
had succeeded in 1876. Perhaps fear of the out-
come may account for the vigor with which The Times
derided Tilden's refusal to let his name go before
the convention, and continued its attacks on "the
great claimant" until Hancock was actually the
candidate.

143

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

However, there was no uncertainty as to the
result of the election of 1880. The story of the elec-
tion of Garfield and Arthur in The Times of Wednes-
day morning, November 3, was headed **The Great
Trust Renewed," and the editorial comment as usual
referred to the "great responsibilities'* which lay on
the leaders of the Republican party. **The momen-
tous issues of the past are decided," said The Times ^
in remarking that sectional questions were disap-
pearing and that an election was once more turning
on problems which did not depend on the climate
for their impression on the voters. How true that
was The Times itself was to show four years later.

In the quarrel over patronage in New York State
which led to the fight between Garfield and Conkling
The Times sided with the President, and made some
severe criticisms of the part played in support of
the New York Senators by Vice-President Arthur —
whom, when he was nominated, it had described as
"a man eminently worthy of a wider sphere for his
abilities." That description is not usually applied
to the Vice Presidency, but when Arthur exerted
his abilities in the extra-official sphere of manipula-
tions at Albany a great many people felt that this
was rather beneath the dignity of the second officer
of the Federal government. And then Garfield was
shot.

The Times's editorial comment on the morning
after very naturally pointed the moral of the evil
results occasioned by the demoralization of the civil
service, which had led a disappointed office seeker
to shoot the President of the United States. Also

144

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

there was some rather stern castigation for political
leaders whose bitter attacks on the President might
have had their effect on the mind of Guiteau, which
in The Times' s opinion was "not remotely akin" to
those of Conkling and Piatt. The next editorial,
headed "To Whom It May Concern," contained
these somewhat pointed observations:

When James A. Garfield was reported
yesterday as lying at the point of death,
new bitterness was added to the poignancy
of public feehng by the thought that
Chester A. Arthur would be his successor.
. . . No holder of the vice-presidential office
has ever made it so plainly subordinate
to his self-interest as a politician and his
narrowness as a partisan.

When Garfield died, however, The Times expressed
approval of the correctness of Arthur's attitude dur-
ing the interim in which there had been much dis-
cussion of the President's "disability." But it
added:

The moment he selects an administrative
officer because the nominee is his friend,
and not at all because he possesses quali-
ties which render him obviously fit to
perform certain public duties, that moment
his administration will be discredited.

Arthur's record made this admonition somewhat
desirable, but if it should be taken literally, one
must fear that a good many administrations would
have been discredited.

Arthur as President turned out a good deal better
than there had been reason to fear, but by no means

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

as well as could have been desired; and throughout
his term The Times was slowly drawing farther away
from what politicians would call reliability. The
great causes in which the paper had long been in-
terested now absorbed still more of its attention;
civil service reform, though progressing slowly, was
having a hard fight against the sturdy opposition
of political leaders; tariff reform was still for most
of the country a matter of religious sentiment and
not of common sense, as Hancock discovered to his
misfortune; and prevalent through much of the
country, especially those parts of the West in which
a whole generation was working itself to death to
bring in civilization, there was a conviction that most
of the problems of poverty would be solved if by
some formula men could borrow hundred-cent dol-
lars and pay their debts in fifty-cent dollars, or in
pieces of paper which the United States government
might see fit to regard as dollars.

To educate the public on these issues took up
much of the energy of the editors of The Times, and
the perception that their efforts were regarded as a
rule with positive hostility by the leaders of the
party gradually cooled that fierce Republican enthu-
siasm which had burned highest in the office in 1876.
Moreover, corruption at Washington was not yet a
matter of ancient history; and The Times in 1881,
by exposing the Star Route frauds, accomplished a
public service which deserves to be ranked next to
the overthrow of Tweed in the paper's res gestae.

The contracting for the delivery of mails on cer-
tain routes (marked with a star on post-ofl&ce records)
lying for the most part in remote and thinly settled

146

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NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

parts of the country, had provided an opening for
some enterprising grafters. The stealing had been
going on for years, and the money abstracted from
the pubHc treasury seems to have amounted to
something like eight or ten million dollars. The
guilty officials were to be found in almost every
branch of the service, and their confederates outside
the department included several politicians of na-
tional eminence.

The frauds were discovered by some of those
eccentric persons who, holding public office in that
period, regarded it as their duty to live on their
salaries and treat their offices as a public trust.
Like the men who exposed Tweed, they knew there
was not much use in reporting their discoveries to
high officials; and like those men they offered the
facts to a newspaper. The parallel goes one step
farther; in each case The Times was the second choice.
Information as to the Star Route peculations was
offered to the Washington correspondent of another
New York newspaper, who sent to his office a syn-
opsis of the evidence. It was plain to the editors
that the trail led pretty high up in the post-office
department and in political life outside, and it seems
to have been feared that in the rarefied atmosphere
of those lofty altitudes investigating journalists
might find the climbing uncomfortable. So the paper
first selected by the discoverers declined their offer-
ings with thanks, and they came to The Times.

The work of following up their leads and analyz-
ing the methods of the conspirators was given to
Frank D. Root of The Times Washington office, who
is still with the paper. He did his work very thor-

147

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

oughly, and by way of a greeting to the new admin-
istration The Times in the spring of 1881 published
the whole history of the frauds with appropriate
comment. In the early days of the exposure, Root's
stories sometimes occupied the entire front page of
the paper and most of the second; and they had their
effect in indictments, resignations, and a clean-up,
of the department. The eventual result, of course,
was not wholly satisfactory. Four years later, in
editorial comment on the end of the last of the
numerous prosecutions arising from the disclosures.
The Times was compelled to record that the case had
closed with *^not one cent recovered and not one
guilty man punished." But the stealing had been
stopped, and one more piece of evidence had been
offered that with the development of investigative
journalism the way of the transgressor was at least
a little harder than in the past.

In another instance in that same year The Times
showed that it could crusade when it found occa-
sion. Justice Theodoric R. Westbrook of the state
Supreme Court had been lending his valuable sup-
port to Jay Gould in the financier's effort to get con-
trol of the Manhattan Elevated Railway Company.
The jurist had even gone to the length of holding
court in Gould's office, and had written to Gould
that he would '^go to the very verge of judicial dis-
cretion" in the aid of Gould's schemes. The Ti^nes
investigated and exposed these transactions, which
were promptly taken up in the Assembly in the hope
of impeaching the judge. One of the leaders in the
effort to get the Assembly to impeach Westbrook
was a young man of good family just beginning his

148

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

official career, to whom the city editor of The Times
furnished the evidence on which he based his first
attack on a misbehaving pubhc servant and a male-
factor of great wealth. As usual, justice flashed in
the pan; the Assembly, for certain devious but not
very dark reasons, finally refused to bring charges
against Westbrook; but the judge thereafter walked
as deHcately as Agag when he was dealing with Jay
Gould, and Assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt found
himself well started on a career as a reformer, v^hich
The Times always thereafter regarded with interest
even when it could not give it support.

Another enterprise of the paper at about that time
was of a less bellicose nature, but equally praise-
worthy — the raising of a ^250,000 fund for General
Grant. First suggested in 1880 by John M. Forbes
of Boston, it was taken up by The Times immedi-
ately after the election. George Jones took a deep
personal interest in the campaign, and succeeded in
pushing it through to complete success by the fol-
lowing March. Thereafter he served as one of the
trustees of the fund until his death.

Accomplishments such as these, together with the
general high standard of the paper's news service
and editorial expression, kept The Times prosperous
and powerful in the early eighties. New influences
were coming into journalism; changes which were
perhaps deplorable, but probably inevitable, were
bringing papers of a diff'erent type into prominence;
but The Times maintained its distinction as a con-
servative paper — a Republican paper, to be sure,
but never subservient to the party managers, inter-

149

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ested in a number of causes essentially nonpartisan
and so drifting steadily away from partisan alle-
giance. That it would actually break away from the
party nobody expected until it actually happened,
but the ground was prepared by the whole history
of the paper and of the party in the previous
years.

By 1884 a good many men were getting ready to
break away from the Republican party. Those
promises of reform had been too often made and too
regularly forgotten to carry much conviction. The
party's reputation was no longer sufficient to carry
a weak candidate; by the beginning of 1884 sensible
men were beginning to realize that it w^ould need a
very strong candidate and a lot of luck. And when it
became apparent that James G. Blaine, carrying all
the handicap of the Mulligr.n letters and the rest of
his past, was likely to get the nomination, and that
the most hopeful of his competitors was President
Arthur, it was evident that the party might have to
carry a heavier load than it had borne for a number
of years. The first efforts of The Times were devoted
to a fight against either of these nominations, and all
through the spring of 1884 the paper conducted an
editorial campaign designed to remind Republicans
who wanted to win that this year the head of the
ticket might have to carry the party instead of riding
free on its record.

By that time the editor of The Times was Charles
R. Miller, who had succeeded John Foord as editor-
in-chief in April, 1883, and who has held that posi-
tion ever since. Mr. Miller was born in Hanover,
N. H., in 1849, graduated from Dartmouth, in 1872,

150

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-18S4

and after several years on The Springfield Republican
came to The Times in 1876. Though of Democratic
origin, he was at that time an independent in
politics. His influence must be counted as con-
siderable in determining the course of the paper in
the campaign, but most of the other editors and Mr.
Jones were in agreement that this year at any rate
it would be impossible to support an obviously unfit
nominee. An exception should be made of the ever-
faithful Reid, who continued to believe that the Re-
publican party was the sole repository of eternal
truth, and thought that even a hint of departure
from its ranks was the unpardonable sin. But nearly
everybody else on The Times felt that though the
paper ought to support the Republican ticket if it
could, there were circumstances in which its duty to
the public demanded a difl?*erent course.

The deciding voice, however, had to be that of
Mr. Jones. The editors who had grown tired of
apologizing for the party's record, who had felt the
gradual turning away of many of the most honorable
and intelligent Republicans from the leaders of the
party, and who had seen with misgiving the failure
of efforts to head off the drift to Blaine — these men
did not own the paper. In fact, none of them had
any stock in it at all, and the certain financial penal-
ties of secession from the party must be borne by
Jones. These considerations were laid frankly before
the owner of the paper by its editor, and with equal
frankness he declared that he could not and would
not support a candidate whom he regarded as de-
plorably unfit for the Presidential office.

The Times published on May 23 an editorial

151

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

headed "Neither Blaine nor Arthur." The text of
that sermon lay in this sentence:

The list of men to choose from is not a
long one. We do not believe that this is a
year when "any good RepubUcan will do."

But there was still hope in the office that the Repub-
lican convention would select a satisfactory can-
didate, and on the same page appeared an editorial
caUing attention to the blunders which the Democrats
had committed, as usual, in the House of Repre-
sentatives.

The next day the campaign was continued in an
article headed "Neither Arthur nor Blaine." In
this, Mr. Miller spoke aloud an opinion which a good
many Republicans had been almost afraid to whis-
per in private, but which they knew to be true:
"The party is not strong enough to elect a President
by the votes of what may be called its regular
members." The notorious defects of Blaine were
briefly mentioned, and President Arthur was dis-
missed with the remark that he

has done better than was expected, and
is reported to have been a modest, quiet,
inoflPensive occupant of the executive office.

But this was no time for modesty and inoffensive-
ness; the country needed something more than that.

Neither Blaine nor Arthur [the editorial
continued] is a possible President. The
choice of a candidate must start from that
fact. That once clearly recognized, it ought
not be difficult to find a man who can poll
the full Republican vote, and with it enough

152

NATIONAL POLITICS, 1872-1884

of the independent vote to keep the govern-
ment in the hands of the party which, we
are convinced, is the safest and best.

When the suspicion gradually arose that The Times
might not swallow Blaine, people began to ask ques-
tions. One of these — a query from an indignant
subscriber who asked outright "if The Times will
support the nominee of the Chicago Republican
Convention'* — was answered on the editorial page
May 29.

If the nominee of the Chicago Republican
Convention [said the editorial reply] is a
man worthy to be President of the United
States, The New York Times will give
him a hearty and vigorous support. If he
shall be a man unworthy to hold that high
office, a man who personally and politically,
in office or out, represents principles and
practices which The Times abhors and has
counseled the party to shun, we shall watch
with great interest the efforts of those re-
sponsible for such a nomination to elect the
candidate, but we shall give them no help.

There it was in plain language: Raymond's paper,
Jones's paper, the paper that had led the Repub-
lican journalism of the nation for a decade, would
not support Blaine. That it would support the
Democratic nominee was as yet by no means cer-
tain, even to its editors, and in the spring of 1884
nobody looked on the possible departure from the
Republican party as anything but a temporary ab-
sence without leave; but absence of any kind, for
any reason, was certain to displease a great many
readers, and it was yet to be seen whether the

153

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

paper's defection would do more harm to the Repub-
lican party or to The Times,

At any rate, the decision was soon made. Blaine
was nominated June 6, on the fourth ballot, and on
the following morning a Times editorial headed
"Facing the Fires of Defeat" announced that the
paper would not support him, but would watch the
party's adventures in the ensuing canvass with
the interest of a friend and physician. Blaine, in the
opinion of The Times, represented "the average of
Repubhcan principles and purposes, of Republican
honor and conscience, as they now are"; and it was
suggested that "defeat will be the salvation of the
Repubhcan party." The editors of a Republican
paper which had just made such a difficult and
costly decision might be expected to hope and be-
Heve that one sad experience would purge the party,
and that thereafter intelligent and patriotic men
could return to it without qualms. That The Times
never has returned to the party, and that for the
next twelve years it leaned toward the Democrats,
was due partly to the unexpectedly large amount of
original sin remaining in the Republican party even
after the purgatorial experience of 1884, and partly
to the new spirit that was coming into American
politics, and was embodied by Grover Cleveland.

154

CHAPTER V

The Times in Transition, 1884-1896

^ I ^HE campaign of 1884 definitely closed an epoch
-■- in the history of The Times. It is hardly
likely that anybody foresaw how complete would
be the break with the party which for twenty-eight
years had commanded the loyal support of the
paper. The Republicans had no monopoly of
corruption and incompetence, and it was quite
possible that the Democrats might make a nomi-
nation as bad as that of the party in power. But
they did not. Cleveland was not very well known
in 1884, but his good record as Governor had given
the editors of The Times confidence in his principles
and his capacity. At that time they were not
personally acquainted with him; the long personal
friendship between Mr. Miller and the President
was a later growth. But what they knew of his
pubhc record was satisfactory, and they soon came
to the conclusion that he deserved the paper's sup-
port. And they had a good deal of company; in
the latter part of July a considerable number of the
best men in the Republican party decided to support
Cleveland, and the Mugwump campaign was on.

So, if The Times had left the party with which
it had so long been associated, it found itself almost
at once recognized as the principal spokesman for a
group which represented much of the best of the old

155

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Republican party and practically none of its un-
desirable elements. And for years thereafter the
paper retained this position, and found its inde-
pendence not only more comfortable and satis-
factory than its former party allegiance, but for a
time almost as lucrative. The rejection of Blaine
did indeed bring losses, which were considerable
but not disastrous. And as an offset to the defec-
tions the paper won many new readers who had
previously found its intense Republicanism some-
what unpalatable.

The income did indeed drop a long way in that
year. The net profits of the paper were ^188,000
in 1883 and only ^56,000 in 1884. But much of this
decrease was due to the reduction in price from
four cents to two, in the hope of meeting the com-
petition of the two-cent World and Sun, which took
effect in September, 1883, And within a few years
The Times, despite the loss of circulation income
which followed the change to two cents, had recov-
ered most of the lost ground and was very nearly as
prosperous as it had been in its best years of the
past. The decline of its fortunes in the early nineties
was due to a complex of reasons, which will be
analyzed presently; but it does not seem that in the
long run it lost very much by abandoning the
Republican party.

What those readers missed who left it in 1884 was,
it may be presumed, not so much Republican editorials
as RepubHcan news. Though deeply aggrieved by
the alteration in the paper's political allegiance,
John Reid stuck to the ship, and before the
campaign was over the political correspondents were

156

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

speaking of the Grand Old Party in pretty much the
same uncomplimentary language that had been
poured out in previous years on the Democrats.
Apparently political writers of the period were moved
more by loyalty to the paper than by their predilec-
tions for any party.

The result of the election was a little doubtful in
1884 — not so doubtful as some of the Republican
leaders pretended, to be sure, but Cleveland carried
New York by only 1 100 votes, and without New York
he could not have won. On election night his sup-
porters thought his majority was considerably
larger, but some of the RepubHcans beHeved that
Blaine had carried the state, and certain eminent
stock speculators kept the wires busy with alleged
news to that effect.

The judgment of The Times rested on the re-
ports of its own unequaled election news service.
Those reports in 1876 had indicated that the election
was in doubt; and while at this distance one may
believe that the RepubHcan claims were unjustified,
the evidence gathered by The Times correspondents
did point to a conclusion borne out by the results.
This was what happened in 1884. If three days
after the election The Times insisted that there could
no longer be any doubt of Cleveland's victory, it
was because the reports of correspondents in whom
the office had learned to have faith, and of the County
Chairmen who wired their figures every night, gave
New York to Cleveland by a majority of 1276.
This was less than two hundred off the final and
official figure; and to have come so close as that in a
vote of over a million, in those more primitive days

157

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and in such a hotly contested election, was a really
remarkable feat of news-gathering.

President Cleveland turned out even better than
The Times had hoped. He fought persistently, and
in great measure successfully, for the causes in
which the paper was most deeply interested —
reform of the tariff and the civil service, and mainte-
nance of sound ideas of public finance. With him,
indeed, a new era began; the war was over, and the
folly of partisan divisions based on memories of the
war was becoming more apparent. The old names,
the old forms, survived; but there were new issues
and new ideas, and for the next decade The Times
had an important part in forming the public opinion
of the new day. In 1888 The Times, still an in-
dependent paper, gave Cleveland its support for
reelection without any hesitation; he had earned it.
But David B. Hill, the Democratic candidate for
governor, had not earned, in The Times^s opinion,
the support of the paper. Accordingly the paper^s
influence in the state campaign was thrown to the
support of the gubernatorial candidacy of Warner
Miller. It was The Times' s luck to back the loser
in each case; Cleveland was beaten, and Miller went
down in history as **the intrepid leader who fell out-
side the breastworks.*' The Republican party was
coming back hungry after a long fast, and outside the
breastworks was a poor place to fall. Nothing
occurred in Benjamin Harrison's administration to
change The Times's opinion that Grover Cleveland
was the most competent and trustworthy man in
American public life, and in 1892 it supported his

158

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-189G

presidential candidacy once more with the convic-
tion born of long acquaintance and complete con-
fidence.

In Cleveland's second term the paper had fallen
on evil days, financially, and its support was perhaps
no longer so powerful as it had been; but it was
whole-hearted and unhesitating through a period of
years when the President most needed friends. The
Republicans had luckily been turned out in time
to escape the blame for the panic of 1893, and were
prospering by the misfortunes and division of their
opponents. A good deal of the Democratic party
had gone out to eat grass like Nebuchadnezzar, and
the rest of it was mainly occupied in doing the work
of the RepubHcans in the tariff struggle. The
President's support was distinguished by quality
rather than by quantity. But The Times saw a man
fighting against desperate odds to preserve the
credit of the nation, to win more and more of the
public service away from the spoilsmen, and to keep
faith with the people on the tariff issue; and it did
what it could to hold up his hands.

What is perhaps even more to its credit, the paper
stood by Cleveland in the Venezuelan question,
when many who had supported him on domestic
issues thought that his rashness was Hkely to provoke
a needless war. The Times maintained throughout
that crisis that Cleveland's Venezuelan message to
Congress was not a war message but a peace mes-
sage; that the resources of routine diplom.acy had
already been exhausted without result, and that
decisive and arresting action was needed to prevent
the dispute from drifting to a point where there

159

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

would have been nothing to do but give up the
Monroe Doctrine or fight. The event showed that
this view was correct. When the British govern-
ment reaHzed that America took the Monroe Doctrine
seriously neither the Ministry nor the people was
willing to make an issue in support of a petty in-
trigue of colonial poHcy, and Cleveland not only
won his point but succeeded in making both America
and England realize that they were worth a good
deal more to each other than they had suspected.
This happy consequence could not be foreseen at
the time by most Americans, and some of the most
bitter opponents of the President were men who had
hitherto given him their support. The position of
The Times was due not only to well-grounded con-
fidence in Cleveland's insight, but to a correct inter-
pretation of the issues; it is easy to praise it now,
but it took both wisdom and courage to adopt it then.
In 1896 the paper was in something of a quandary
as to the Presidential campaign. For the ideas and
the principles of William Jennings Bryan it had no
use; it had seen in past decades a good many Mes-
siahs from the tall grass who promised to make two
dollars grow where one had grown before. But
it saw no particular reason for confidence in the
party of Mark Hanna. On the tariff question the
leaders of the Republican party stood for everything
The Times abhorred, and while eventually the party
and its candidate took the right position on the
overshadowing issue of the currency, they were a
long time in making up their minds, ^o The Times
gave its support to the Gold Democratic ticket of
Palmer and Buckner. In a sense, of course, its

160

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

efforts were wasted; everybody knew that Palmer
and Buckner could do nothing but make a gesture
of protest. But a protest was badly needed in that
year.

At the end of Cleveland's second administration, on
March 2, 1897, The Times published a six-column
editorial signed with the initials of Charles R. Miller
— so far as can be discovered, the only signed
editorial that has ever appeared in the paper except
in discussion of the paper's own affairs — reviewing
the President's record. Today, when hardly any-
body denies Cleveland's claim to greatness, this
contemporary estimate can be studied with some
profit. In the history of The Times there is nothing
more creditable than the steadfast and loyal support
which the paper gave to Abraham Lincoln and
Grover Cleveland in dark days when it could not be
foreseen that the faith of its editors would be ap-
proved by the judgment of posterity.

American journalism was changing fast in the
eighties. The first influence in bringing in new
ideas, that were destined to work more powerfully
than their originators realized, was that of Charles
A. Dana; the most powerful influence was that of
Joseph Pulitzer. Between them, they eventually
succeeded in inflicting mortal injuries on the old
type of political newspaper that had flourished in
the age of the slavery issue, the Civil War and re-
construction. Of the old-timers The Times survived
longest — with the possible exception of The Tribune,
which passed a good many years in a state of coma
with only occasional signs of persisting vitality.

161

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The modern type of newspaper in which the news
side is predominant, though not to the exclusion of a
vigorous editorial page, has taken form during the
control of The Times by the present management,
and it may not unfairly be said that that management
has had a considerable influence in establishing the
character of such papers; but in the late eighties and
early nineties American journalism was headed in a
different direction, and The Times stood out as
almost the last representative of the old school.
That it retained its influence in a changing world
so long as it did, and indeed that it survived its
extraneous misfortunes and lived to rise again, is
sufficient evidence of the vitality of its old organiza-
tion even when compelled to meet conditions for
which it was not wholly prepared.

Though "personal journalism" in the old sense
had passed, the editorial page was still for perhaps
the majority of Times readers the most important
part of the paper; but the news service was still good.
As an instance may be cited an episode which
was remembered in The Times office because of
the fact that it produced the most expensive cable
message which the paper has ever received. In 1884
there was under negotiation a commercial treaty
with Spain, which would have an important effect
on American trade with Cuba and Porto Rico.
John W. Foster, the American Minister in Madrid,
was conducting negotiations with the Spanish
Foreign Ministry; but the provisions of the expected
treaty were carefully kept a secret. Since they
were of great importance to all exporters and mer-
chants doing business with the Spanish West Indies,

162

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THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

all the papers had been trying hard to find out the
contents of the treaty in Washington and Madrid;
but both governments were extremely reticent. At
last it became known that the treaty had been
completed, and that Minister Foster was bringing
it home for presentation to the Senate.

Early in December, 1884, The Times received
information that certain persons in Madrid were
able, and would be willing, to communicate the text
of the treaty, which they seem to have obtained
through financial connections, to an American
newspaper. At once The Times cabled a credit of
$8000 to these men to cover cable tolls, necessary
expenses, and whatever personal remuneration might
be found suitable. The full text of the treaty was
cabled back to The Times, at a cable rate of 66 cents
a word, translated in the office, and published on
December 8. It occupied five columns of the front
page; and the rest of the page was taken up with
as many expressions of opinion from business men as
could be obtained on Sunday.

John W. Foster, on that morning, woke up in the
downtown hotel to which he had been driven from
the pier the night before, and upon opening his copy
of The Times dived hastily under the bed and looked
in his bag. To his certain knowledge the only copy
of that treaty in the United States had been brought
in by him the night before, and he could explain the
publication in The Times only on the theory that
somebody had gone through his baggage in the night.
But his copy of the treaty was still there; and it was
duly taken to Washington and laid before the Senate.
By that time, however, men who had studied the

163

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

treaty had come to the conclusion that it did not
give sufficient protection to American commercial
interests; and its rejection by the Senate may be
taken as the result principally of the prompt and
full publication in The Times.

Another foreign news story on which The Times
beat the town was the revolution in Brazil which
overthrew the Emperor, Dom Pedro II. A feature
of The Times which its readers could count on
every Sunday was Harold Frederic's cable letter
from London. In those simpler days only excep-
tional events in Europe were reported at any length
as soon as they happened; the daily cables carried
only a sort of skeleton of the news, and every New
York paper depended on the weekly cable letters
from London and Paris for general interpretative
discussion of foreign affairs. In this field, of great
importance in those days, Harold Frederic was in
the eighties and nineties without superior, and his
correspondence from London was one of the great
features of The Times.

Toward the very end of Mr. Jones's life — in the
early summer of 1891 — The Times undertook an-
other crusade, this time against certain abuses in
the New York Life Insurance Company. W. C.
Van Antwerp, then a member of The Times's Wall
Street staff and later president of the Stock Exchange,
followed up a tip which had come to the paper with
such amazing exposures that before long the officers
of the company had filed personal libel suits against
Jones and Miller for millions of dollars. These suits,
naturally, had no consequence except to make The
Times more diligent in proving its case; and the

164

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

affair ended In the board of directors of the com-
pany coming in a body to the office of the editor
of The Times, and asking him to tell them how to
clean house. As a result of this visit John A. Mc-
Call was elected president of the company and the
necessary reforms were carried out.

The building which in 1857 had seemed prepos-
terously expensive and unnecessarily large for a news-
paper office was by this time too small. Construc-
tion of the second building erected by The Times, and
the fourth home of the paper — which, like the
first, was in its day the finest newspaper structure
in the country — was begun in 1888 from designs
by George B. Post, and involved an engineering feat
which aroused much astonishment at the time. It
was found impossible to move out temporarily while
the old building was razed and a new one erected on
the same spot, and it became necessary to tear down
the old building and put up the new one at the same
time, while the work of getting out the paper con-
tinued in the midst of the wreckers and rebullders.
Thus as the old building disappeared the new one
gradually took shape In its place, and by April,i889,
the work of reconstruction was completed.

Mr. Jones was fond of saying in his later years
that this building would be his monument. He was
mistaken in that; it was soon surpassed in size and
splendor by new skyscrapers, and before long it
passed out of the control of The Times, though it
continued to house the paper for a decade after it
had ceased to be in fact the Times Building. He
may have thought that the paper itself would be

165

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

another monument, but in that, too, he was mis-
taken; The Times fell into misfortune and had to
be rebuilt by other men. His true monument is a
house not made with hands; it is to be found in a
better informed public opinion, a higher standard of
public morality; in a city and a nation where workers
for good government are no longer hopeless or afraid.
He died on August 12, 1891, at the age of eighty,
having spent the last half of his life in The Times
office. In the editorial appraisal of his work which
appeared in the paper after his death it was said
that

his wish was that the newspaper should
pay more attention to the worthy than to
the unworthy side of human nature, that
it should commend itself to right-thinking
persons of some seriousness of mind and
judgment rather than strive to satisfy the
desire to know what the sinful and frivolous
are about.

Further in that editorial it was stated that "no
writer of The Times was ever required or asked to
urge upon the public views which he did not accept
himself." This ought to be true on every news-
paper, and it is true on a good many — on more
today than thirty years ago.

To the best of the knowledge and belief of the
oldest members of the staff, it has always been true
on The Times,

It is often supposed that the decline in the finan-
cial prosperity of The Times which set in in the early
nineties had its origin years earlier, in the loss of
Republican readers in 1884 and the reluctance of

166

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

Jones to adopt the new methods of a new age. As
already suggested, there does not seem much ground
for this behef. The ground lost in 1884 had been
pretty nearly recovered within three or four years.
What really started The Times downhill was the
heavy expense of the new building. The annual
profit dropped from well over ,^100,000 in the middle
eighties to only ^15,000 in 1890.

It was true that the business system of The Times
was out of date. It had done well enough in the
sixties and seventies, when making a newspaper was
a much simpler and less expensive matter; but times
had changed. Expenses — necessary expenses —
were rising every year. Competition was keener,
abler, and more vigorous than ever before; and The
Times was at a disadvantage with some of its com-
petitors whose methods of advertising themselves,
and of gathering and presenting the news, were not
handicapped by any ethical scruples. A business
organization of the modern type the paper had never
had — and had never needed so long as George
Jones was alive. There was no sound system of
cost accounting; nobody knew just what the paper
was getting out of the money it spent. But if the
machine was antiquated and rusty, Jones knew
every peculiarity of its workings, and so long as he
lived to run it he could get results. When he died
and a new man took the wheel, the defects of the
mechanism became painfully apparent.

The great majority of The Times stock was owned
by Mr. Jones at his death, and left by him to his
children, with the injunction, embodied in his will,
that the paper should never be sold. Its active

167

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

direction was assumed by his son Gilbert, and his
son-in-law, Henry L. Dyer. Gilbert E. Jones had
been trained in The Times office for twenty years,
but there are some things about newspaper manage-
ment that cannot be learned, but must come by the
gift of God. In one respect, indeed, Gilbert Jones
was an expert. He knew a great deal about news-
paper mechanics; but neither he nor Dyer could
operate an outworn business mechanism and recover
the money that had been sunk in the new building.

Also, The Times under George Jones had paid so
well that his children were left with a good deal of
property outside their stock in the paper. Natu-
rally, when The Times began to lose they were some-
what reluctant to throw into it the money which
would enable them to live on in independence and
comfort aside from any consideration of its fortunes.
It is hardly surprising that when it became appar-
ent that the new management could not make the
paper pay, the heirs began to think of disregarding
the stipulation that they should hold on to the
paper whether it proved to be a source of profit or
a drain upon the fortunes of the family.

The reduction of the price to two cents, in 1883,
had not brought the expected increase in circulation
and had materially reduced the income. The two-
cent Times was soon forced to compete with one-
cent papers; and the stroke of genius which saved
The Times in 1898 by reducing the price to one cent,
and discovering a new army of readers in a field
where it had been supposed there was no appetite for
anything but the variegated and somewhat too highly
flavored menu offered by some of the other papers,

168

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

was beyond the vision of the heirs of George Jones.
The best they could do was to raise the price, and
it was set at three cents in December, 1891. The
result was a further loss in circulation, and before
Jones had been dead a year his children were pre-
paring to get rid of a property which had been a
gold mine in his hands, but which they found only
a burden.

It came to the knowledge of the editors of The
Times late in 1892 that the paper was likely to be
sold, and sold to a gentleman who, whatever his
good qualities, could hardly be regarded as an en-
tirely desirable chief by the men who had served
Raymond and Joijes. There were men on The Times
who understood and valued its great traditions, who
had given the best part of their lives as a contribu-
tion to its work, and who were unwilling to let that
work come to nothing; and it was as a desperate
resort that they undertook to buy the paper them-
selves, with the aid of their friends.

On April 13, 1893, The Times was sold to the New
York Times Publishing Company, of which the
president was Charles R. Miller, the editor of the
paper. Mr. Miller and his associates, Edward Cary
and George F. Spinney, had been the organizers of
the new company. Some of the men associated with
them in the ownership had come in because of per-
sonal friendship, others because they appreciated
the continuing need for such a paper as The Times.

The price paid to the Jones estate was ^1,000,000,
and it bought virtually nothing but the name and
good will of the paper. The real estate was trans-
ferred to another company controlled by Mr. Jones's

169

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

heirs, and his newspaper continued as a tenant in
the building erected with its profits and its credit.
In order to recoup themselves for the losses sus^
tained in the past two years, Jones and Dyer had
also retained the outstanding accounts receivable.
The presses were old and dilapidated; the linotype
machines were only leased. A million dollars was a
good deal of money to pay for the privilege of con-
tinuing the business at the old stand, but the men
who paid it were those who knew, loved, and ap-
preciated the merits of the paper. The heirs of
Mr. Jones were naturally more interested in getting
a price which would set them back in the position
they had occupied before they had essayed to pub-
lish The Times themselves, while its editors were
chiefly concerned to prevent it from being "sold
down the river." This diff^erence in purpose also
accounts for the fact that the new owners were will-
ing, when they found it necessary, to pay cash.
As a matter of fact, one man who had promised
and expected to invest ^50,000 in the enterprise
found at the last moment that he could not get the
money, so Jones and Dyer, appreciating the loy-
alty of the men who wanted to continue George
Jones's paper and who could not possibly scrape
together more than ^950,000, decided to accept that
sum.

Though the editors of The Times held only a small
minority of the stock in the new company, it was
understood that they were to undertake the editorial
and business management of the paper. Unfortu-
nately, it could not be managed without money. All

170

THE TIMES IN TRANSITION, 1884-1896

the money still due The Times was to be paid to the
Jones estate; and the editors had put into the pur-
chase price every cent they had or could raise among
their friends. They had no outside properties such
as would have enabled Jones and Dyer to carry the
paper, for a time, at a loss. And then came the
panic of 1893.

Not only did that panic make it all but impossible
to find money to carry on the paper, but it led to
a great and ruinous decrease in advertising — espe-
cially financial advertising, in which The Times had
always been preeminent. The new company never
had a chance to get started; the only surprising
feature of its history is that it managed to hold on
for three years. Eventually it managed to sell
^250,000 of debenture notes, and the money thus
received carried the paper along; but it was losing
more heavily every day. As it lost money it be-
came less able to incur expenditures for the gather-
ing and presentation of news; and becoming thus a
less valuable newspaper it lost still more money.
The editorial page was as good as ever, and its
valiant support of President Cleveland is one of the
brightest spots in the history of The Times; but it
is the only bright spot between 1893 and 1896.

For the restoration of the paper to its former
state various schemes were devised by the men who
had invested in the new company, but none of them
gave much ground for confidence, and it began to
seem that the great institution built up by Raymond
and Jones might fall into unworthy hands, or lose
its individuality by consolidation with another
paper. Hope that The Times could be restored

171

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

while retaining its character had almost vanished,
when there appeared in New York a small-town
newspaperman from Tennessee, who became in-
terested in the problem and presently set himself
to find a solution. This was Adolph S. Ochs, of
Chattanooga.

172

PART II

CHAPTER 1

Restoration of The Times, 1896-1900

^ I ^HE history of The New York Times since 1896
-*- should properly be written with a somewhat
different emphasis and from another viewpoint
than the story of the paper under Raymond and
Jones. In their day, a newspaper was first of all
a vehicle of political opinion; and, as has been
noted, The Times retained that character longer
than most of its contemporaries. The art of gath-
ering and presenting news was primitive in Ray-
mond's day, and indeed in Jones's day; and the
ideal of impartial and disinterested news was less
generally respected. So the history of The Times
before 1896 must in large part be the history of a
political newspaper, and its interaction with the
changing feelings of the period.

In the story of The Times as it is today, a
paper which was born again in 1896, discussion of
political views takes a secondary position. For
most newspaper readers of the present the news de-
partment is of more importance than anything else,
and in the modern history of the art of getting and
presenting news The Times has a prominent part.
Another department of the paper, subordinate but
essential, also claims a share of interest. In the time
of Raymond and Jones the volume of business even
of the most successful paper was small, by modern

17s

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

standards, and its organization had none of the in-
tricacy of development essential for the paper of
today. Nor were the ethical standards of the mid-
nineteenth century as exacting as those of today.
The modern newspaper has to find revenue, free
from subvention of any kind and particularly in
the shape of political patronage, to provide for the
enormous expenditures for news. The history of the
development of the business affairs of The Times in
the past twenty-five years offers a good deal of in-
struction and interest; it is the story of the rise of
a paper exemplifying certain principles from desti-
tution to a degree of prosperity almost without par-
allel, and one which seemed to a good many news-
papermen beyond the reach of a paper conducted
on those principles.

Moreover, the editorial character of The Times
has always been pretty much the same, in prosper-
ity and in adversity. In 1851, in 1871, in 1884 and
in 1921 it was a sober, conservative, dignified paper,
always American, with its special position in the
esteem of readers who valued sobriety of discussion
and intelligent and balanced judgment. The prin-
cipal interest in the history of the modern Times
lies in the process by which this paper, which in its
best days of old had seldom had more than 35,000
subscribers, came to appeal to more than ten times
that number. Its rise surprised even its conductors;
the best they hoped, twenty-five years ago, was
that a paper conducted on the principles which they
held might attain as large a circulation as 50,000.

The story of this astounding rise to prosperity and
influence has been told by other writers, but only in

176

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

fragments. This history will attempt for the first
time to tell it as a whole, and with fuller and more
authentic details than have previously been pre-
sented to the reader, in the belief that it will be
found instructive by men engaged in making news-
papers and of some interest even to the general
public, which believes more and knows less about
newspaper making than about almost any other
business on earth. The story is unfinished; its ac-
tion is still going on; its chief actors, or most of
them, are still on the stage. This fact perhaps im-
poses some restraint on the historian, but it is his
belief and the belief of the conductors of The Times
that no relevant detail of the story has been omitted.
Because it is an unfinished story, however, the nar-
rative must be treated as a record rather than as
a critical history. It is too early for detached judg-
ment on most of the work of the past twenty-five
years in The Times ofliice, and in any case the men
who have done that work, and whose views are rep-
resented in this part of the narrative, are not the
men to pass judgment on what they themselves
have done. The rise of The Times possesses, to a
rather unusual degree, that romance which attaches
to the growth of most great business enterprises;
but that side of the story must be left for treat-
ment by persons outside the institution. It could,
moreover, easily lead to a distorted view of some of
the phases of that growth. The fact that The Times
was often, in past years, desperately hard up, has
some romantic and dramatic value; but for the pur-
poses of this narrative the fact, which may be as-
sumed, is less important than the policies pursued

177

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

by the management of the paper in that situation.
Essentially, then, this story must be something in
the nature of a report of a laboratory experiment,
presented by those who have done the work for the
critical judgment of the public outside.

Adolph S. Ochs, publisher of The Chattanooga
Times, who came into the history of The New York
Times in the spring of 1896, had been first actively
interested in New York City papers by a hasty
summons from a friend in New York, who had tele-
graphed, ''The opportunity of your hfe lies before
you." This opportunity, it was presently discovered,
was the business management of The New York Mer-
cury, 3. publication which maintained a rather pre-
carious existence in somewhat the same field as that
now occupied by The Morning Telegraph. The great
free silver campaign of 1896 was about to begin,
and a group of ''silver Senators" had planned to
buy The Mercury and estabhsh it as a free silver
daily in New York.

Mr. Ochs's informant was a personal friend, Leo-
pold Wallach, a prominent member of the New
York bar, who later was for many years, until his
death, legal adviser of The Times, He, though hos-
tile to the free silver cause, had become acquainted
in a professional way with some of these gentlemen,
and when he learned that they were seeking an ex-
perienced newspaperman as business manager of the
enterprise he at once thought of his friend in Chat-
tanooga.

To the execution of this plan, however, there was
an insuperable obstacle. Mr. Ochs believed in the

178

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RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

gold standard, and his newspaper, The Chattanooga
Times, was its most consistent advocate in the
southern states at a time when most of the south-
ern Democrats were making a fetish of i6 to i.
When he learned the nature of the enterprise, after
arriving in New York, he declined to consider the
offer; and for various reasons the plan was pres-
ently abandoned. The owner of The Mercury, how-
ever, was still eager to get rid of his property; and
after some conversations with Mr. Ochs he offered
to sell it to him. Mr. Ochs saw what he thought
was an opening in New York City for a small strictly
news paper at one cent. Although he was not par-
ticularly interested in The Mercury as it then was,
it seemed to him that The Mercury might be trans-
formed into a newspaper of this sort, for it was a
client of the associated newspapers of New York and
received their full service. This service was at that
time quite complete, as The New York Sun, Times,
Herald and Tribune were directing the United Press
organization in a bitter contest with the Associated
Press, which at that time was composed chiefly of
western papers. But the negotiation for the purchase
of The Mercury came to nothing when the owner
found he could not give an assurance for a contin-
uance of the press association news service of the
other New York dailies. The Mercury shortly there-
after ceased publication, but the negotiations had
caused Mr. Ochs to make several trips to New
York, and in the meantime a rather academic interest
which he had previously expressed in the affairs of
The Times had been awakened.
It happened that in 1890 Harry Alloway, a mem-
179

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ber of The Times Wall Street staff, had been enter-
tained by Mr. Ochs while on a trip through the
South and had heard him remark that The New
York Times offered the greatest opportunity in
American journalism. Long after this — ■ on March
12, 1896, Mr. Ochs's thirty-eighth birthday — he re-
ceived a telegram from Mr. Alloway saying that if
he was interested there seemed likely to be an op-
portunity of acquiring The New York Times with
no very large outlay of money. Alloway knew of
the financial difficulties of The Times, and of some
plans for its reorganization, and telegraphed to Mr.
Ochs purely as a friendly act, without authority
from any one. Mr. Ochs did not take the matter
very seriously; but it happened that the next day
he had occasion to go to Chicago. While there he
took lunch with his friend, Herman H. Kohlsaat,
publisher and proprietor of the Chicago Times-
Herald, to whom he incidentally mentioned the tele-
gram from Alloway. A general discussion of the
New York newspaper situation ensued, and Mr.
Kohlsaat observed that he thought The Times was
Mr. Ochs's opportunity. To this Mr. Ochs ob-
jected that he didn't think he was a big enough
man for the job. "Don't tell anybody," Mr. Kohl-
saat advised him, "and they'll never find it out."
Arriving in New York a few days later, Mr. Ochs
met Mr. Alloway and learned from him the infor-
mation he had gathered about the situation in The
Times office — that a plan of reorganization was
being discussed, that several newspaper managers in
New York had been approached with the sugges-
tion that they try to rebuild The TimeSy and that

180

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

for an investment of ^250,000 it might be possible
to secure control. Mr. Ochs having displayed in-
terest, Mr. Alloway arranged an interview with
Charles R. Miller, the editor-in-chief. Mr. Ochs
and Mr. Miller met for the first time that evening
at Mr. Miller's residence. The interview had been
arranged for a few minutes after dinner, as Mr.
Miller had an engagement to accompany his family
to the theatre. Two kindred souls met. The dis-
cussion of the situation of The Times and of Mr.
Ochs's ideas of newspaper making was so absorbing
that the family went ahead to the theatre on the
understanding that Mr. Miller would join them
later. The performance ended, they returned and
found the discussion still in progress. It lasted until
midnight, and resulted in convincing Mr. Miller
that the man from Chattanooga had some pretty
sound ideas about the reconstruction of The Times.
Mr. Miller arranged for Mr. Ochs to meet the
next day the men who were working out a plan of
reorganization for which they had secured some
promises of new capital. Charles R. Flint and
Spencer Trask, who were at the head of this move-
ment, were both favorably impressed, and invited
Mr. Ochs at once to join the syndicate they were
forming, which had only a day or so left to make
its plans operative and hold the tentative subscrip-
tions. But the plan required more money from Mr.
Ochs than he could command, or would have cared
to endeavor to secure. When he declined to become
financially interested, Mr. FHnt had acquired such
confidence in his ideas that he offered Mr. Ochs the
management of the proposed reorganized company,

181

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and intimated that a salary of $50,000 a year was
not beyond the possibiKties. In other circumstances
Mr. Ochs might have been wiUing to go down in his-
tory as the first Tennessean who ever got such a
salary, but he was of the opinion that if he tried
to manage The Times for somebody else the most
probable result would be the speedy disappearance
of the job, the salary and The Times.

The failure of this plan left the way clear for
that faction of the stockholders which wanted to
consolidate The Times with The New York Re-
corder^ a. daily newspaper on which several millions
had been spent in a fruitless effort to establish it.
They had even gone so far as to file at Albany ap-
plication for a charter for "The Times-Recorder
Company," with a capital of $2,500,000, when
Charles R. Miller and Edward Cary, who were the
chief editors of the paper and members of its Board
of Directors, obtained the appointment of a receiver
and circumvented this plan.

All those interested in the reorganization who had
met Mr. Ochs seemed agreed that he was the man
The Times needed, and the receiver, Mr. Alfred Ely,
was selected by those friendly to Mr. Ochs. But it
should be remembered that before his appearance it
had been the conviction of most of those interested
in The Times that it needed a man experienced in
New York journalism to do the work. Every am-
bitious managing editor in town had long ago been
approached and invited to attempt the restoration
of The Times, and with one accord they had all
made excuses. Not till the whole field of metro-
politan journaHsm had been searched in vain for a

182

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

rescuer, not till every one of the men who ought to
have known had declared that The Times could not
be restored, did Mr. Ochs get his chance. These
experienced men, with intimate knowledge of the
New York newspaper situation, were of one opinion
— that it would require several million dollars to re-
suscitate The Times and place it in a position to
compete with The Herald, The Worlds The Journal,
The Tribune and The Sun, all having men of great
wealth as owners or interested in their success.

Mr. Ochs's experience, to be sure, had been varied
enough. He was thirty-eight years old; he had
started in the newspaper business at the age of eleven
as a carrier of papers, had graduated from that posi-
tion to printer's devil, and had worked up through
every position which either the news, the editorial,
or the business department of Tennessee journalism
had to offer until at the age of twenty he had be-
come proprietor and publisher of The Chattanooga
Times. In eighteen years he had brought this paper
to a degree of prosperity remarkable in a city of that
size, and to a position in public confidence perhaps
still more unusual — for the obstacles to journalistic
virtue are perhaps most formidable in the smaller
cities. Among southern newspaper men he was al-
ready widely known, but Chattanooga is a long way
from New York; and the gentlemen who were
trying to dig The Times out of the drifts were slow
to admit that a problem which was by this time
too much for them, and which had been politely
evaded by some of the ablest newspaper managers
in New York, could be solved by an unknown from
a small town. Fortunately, Mr. Ochs was able to

183

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

gather a formidable volume of letters of recommen-
dation. They came from the President of the United
States, from Senators, Governors and bishops; from
bank presidents, railroad presidents, editors of rival
newspapers and people who had known him in Chat-
tanooga. That he was able to produce so many of
them was perhaps due to the fact that he had been
semi-officially recognized as the entertainer of dis-
tinguished visitors to Chattanooga, and thus had
become fairly well acquainted with a wider circle
than the ordinary newspaper man of the interior
could know. At any rate he had many letters and
their tone was convincing. They served to reinforce
the confidence which had gradually been estabhshed
by personal contact.

It was expected that the receivership, which was
a friendly one, would be required for only a few
days, pending the adoption of a plan of reorganiza-
tion fathered by Mr. Spencer Trask. But this
scheme also miscarried, and with Mr. Trask's en-
couragement Mr. Ochs submitted a new plan which
he presented personally to nearly every stockholder
and creditor of The New York Times Publishing
Company. It was approved and accepted, and Mr.
Trask consented to act as Chairman of the Reorgani-
zation Committee, whose other members were Mar-
cellus Hartley, Alfred Ely, James T. Woodward, and
E. Mora Davison. The plan was declared operative
on July 2, 1896.

It was a pretty large undertaking for Mr. Ochs
to buy control of The Times, even though he was
buying it mostly with his ability rather than his
money; but it was not much larger, in proportion,

184

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

than the effort he had made eighteen years before,
when, not yet old enough to vote, he had bought
The Chattanooga Times by paying $250 in cash —
borrowed — and assuming its debt of $1500. It
seemed to him that the principles which had suc-
ceeded in Chattanooga might succeed equally well
in New York; at any rate they were the only prin-
ciples which he felt competent to put into practice.
Only one new resolution did he make on coming to
New York — a firm resolve not to have any other
outside interest, but to give all his attention, and
employ all the resources of his credit, for the inter-
ests of The Times,

The plan of reorganization has already been told
in various publications, but may perhaps here be
given in outline. A new organization, The New
York Times Company, was formed, with a capital
of 10,000 shares of par value of $100. Two thou-
sand of these shares were traded in for the 10,000
shares of the old company. The holders of the out-
standing obligations of The Times, amounting to
some $300,000, received in exchange an equal amount
of 5 per cent bonds of the new company; and per-
haps the most exacting part of the financing of the
reorganization was accomplished when $200,000
more of these bonds were sold at par, to provide
that operating capital the lack of which had been
so severely felt in past years. As a persuasive, fif-
teen shares of stock were offered to each purchaser
of a $1000 bond. Mr. Ochs himself, scraping to-
gether all the money he had or could borrow, bought
$75,000 of these bonds, receiving with them 11 25
shares of stock. Of the remaining capital stock of

185

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the company 3876 shares were put into escrow, to
be delivered to Mr. Ochs whenever the paper had
earned and paid expenses for a period of three con-
secutive years. Thus he would have — and within
less than four years did have — 5001 of the 10,000
shares and ^75,000 in bonds, the whole acquired
by the payment of $75,000 for the bonds and by
his personal services. That $75,000 was the finan-
cial investment, and the only investment, aside from
his own labors, which the controlling stockholder of
The Times made for his majority interest.

The company thus organized bought The Times
at pubhc sale on August 13, 1896. The receiver-
ship was terminated by court order; on August 18,
1896, the property was formally transferred to the
reorganized company, with Mr. Ochs as publisher
in unrestricted control; and the saddest chapter in
the history of The Times was closed.

It may be well at this point to puncture a few
bubbles of fantasy which have been widely blown
about. The Times probably has the distinction of
having been more generally misrepresented than any
other newspaper in the United States. Some of
these misrepresentations are due to malice, some to
the somewhat painfully widespread inability of mem-
bers of the human race to beheve in the honesty of
their fellows; a good many of them, one must sup-
pose, have no other origin than the myth-making
instinct whose pervasiveness is perhaps not fully ap-
preciated by any but newspaper men. The rejuve-
nated Times succeeded so rapidly and so briUiantly
that people who could not understand it? success

186

ADOLPH S. OCHS,
August 18, 1896.

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

found it most convenient to suppose that great sums
of money had been poured into it from some secret
and probably discreditable reservoir. Ignorance was
soon reinforced by hostility; persons who disagreed
with the conservatism of The Times editorial policy,
and who were quite unable to conceive the idea that
a man, and even a newspaper, might honestly be-
lieve in conservative principles, thought that the ex-
planation could be found in the theory that The
Times had been bought by Wall Street bankers.
It is unfortunately true that a large percentage of
the all too human race can find no explanation for
disagreement with its opinions except that those who
disagree have been bought by somebody. And the
ascription to various eminent financiers of the honor
of being the man behind the throne on The Times
is probably due quite as much to credulity as to
malice. It is more romantic and entertaining to
suppose that a newspaper is the mouthpiece of a
mysterious malefactor of great wealth, who gives his
orders to its editors in a few pregnant monosyllables,
than to accept the prosaic truth that it represents
the views of its owners and conductors.

In more recent years the legend of British gold
offered a convenient explanation of The Times^s at-
titude on the Great War to Irish and German enthu-
siasts who were used to the idea of subsidized news-
papers, but the force of this view was somewhat
diminished when the Irish and Germans extended it
from The Times to all other American newspapers
which failed to see in Sinn Fein and Kaiserism the
sum of human perfection. The secret ownership or
control of The Times has been ascribed to so many

187

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

different men that one might suppose some doubt
would have arisen in the minds of the most credu-
lous; at any rate they couldn't all own it at once.
But the number of people who can be fooled all the
time is regrettably large.

A few of the more important myths will here be
cited and explained, in so far as they can be ex-
plained by anything except the credulity of human
nature. It is not to be supposed that the explana-
tions will be accepted by Sinn Feiners, admirers of
the late Kaiser or devotees of the principles of Karl
Marx or Nikolai Lenin. To convince these gentle-
men is beyond the power of human logic. But some
explanation may perhaps be of interest to the large
number of readers of The Times who have heard
these various rumors and have perhaps been in-
clined to believe them because the paper has not
thought them worthy of explicit denial.

President Cleveland, for example, did not bring
Mr. Ochs up from Chattanooga to set a good Demo-
cratic paper on its feet. Mr. Cleveland had no more
idea, when Mr. Ochs came to New York, that he
was going to buy The Times than did Mr. Ochs
himself. The only possible basis for this legend lies
in the fact that when Mr. Ochs found New Yorkers
somewhat reluctant to accept the views of a man
about whom they knew nothing, he collected a large
number of letters of recommendation, as noted
above, from everybody whose endorsement seemed
Ukely to be of value. Naturally a recommendation
from Mr. Cleveland, then in the White House,
would carry a good deal of weight. The President
wrote that

i88

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

***** in your management of The
Chattanooga Times you have demonstrated
such a faithful adherence to Democratic
principles, and have so bravely supported
the ideas and policies which tend to the
safety of our country as well as of our party
that I would be glad to see you in a larger
sphere of usefulness. *****

This was Mr. Cleveland's sole contribution to the
reorganization of The Times.

Of the various bankers who have been mentioned
as the controlling influence in The Times, August
Belmont has perhaps the distinction of having been
named most often. Mr. Belmont, as a matter of
fact, owned ^25,000 of the debentures of the old
company, which he exchanged for bonds of the new
organization, and these bonds were bought by The
Times long ago, at par, and retired.

The assertion that he controlled The Times was
some years ago spread rather widely by the Hearst
papers, which eventually retracted it when its un-
truth was demonstrated. It is doubtless often re-
peated by persons who do not realize how it came
to be diffused.

Before the inventive German propagandist sup-
plied the more brilliant explanation of British gold,
it was a favorite doctrine of Socialist thinkers that
The Times was an organ of the Morgan firm. J. P.
Morgan & Co. held ^25,000 of the debentures of the
old company, like Mr. Belmont, and like him ac-
cepted for these obligations an equal amount of the
bonds of the new company, which were also bought
and paid for by The Times at par value and retired

189

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

years ago. Numerous other financiers, traction
magnates and politicians, shady and otherwise, have
also figured in these romances, but none of them ever
owned a dollar's worth of The Times Company stock
or in any manner had the power to influence the
policies of The Times, editorial or other. Nor did any
of them ever get anything out of The Times except such
information as they may have obtained from its news
columns or such moral elevation as they may have
derived from the study of its editorial page. And
it might be added that none of them was ever in
a position to control, influence or affect the paper's
policies.

But theorists who have been unwilling to display
favoritism by believing that any one man was the
secret master of The Times, when so many have been
mentioned, have cherished the belief that the paper
was dominated by its bondholders as a group. It
is not. The outstanding bonds amount to less than
$600,000. The name of every person or institu-
tion holding more than i per cent of this not very
formidable amount may be found on the editorial
page of the paper, twice a year. These bonds rep-
resent the residue of an issue of $1,200,000 put out
some years ago in financing the construction of The
Times Building after retiring the bonds of 1896.
The bonds were bought, just as any other bonds
are bought, by people who thought they were a good
investment; who believed, that is to say, that The
Times would be able to pay interest and principal.
It will be noted that more than half that issue has
already been retired out of earnings.

As The Times grew and moved into new quarters
190

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

it had to make heavy investments in real estate and
machinery. The Times Building, like any other new
building, was mortgaged during its construction.
The mortgage was placed like any other mortgage —
because those who made the loan thought that the
Times Building was a safe risk. It is being con-
stantly reduced, and is now less than a million
dollars — on property worth several times that
amount. So bonds and mortgage, the total in-
debtedness of the company, amount to something
like ^1,500,000. The cash resources of the com-
pany are more than sufficient to pay this off at
any time. The value of the company's real estate
and paper-mill properties, entirely apart from plant,
good will and other resources, is several times the
indebtedness. So virtually The New York Times
as a newspaper entity is free of any indebtedness of
any kind or description.

Where did the money come from which built up
the institution ? Aside from ^100,000 of the ^200,000
of new capital provided by the sale of bonds in 1896,
it came out of the earnings. Of the money which
the paper has earned during the last twenty-five
years, in round figures ^100,000,000, 97 per cent
has been put into the operation and development
of the property and 3 per cent has been kept for
the owners in dividends. There have been com-
mercial borrowings from time to time, as in any
business; but the loans have always been paid
promptly, and in no case were the lenders influenced
by any other consideration than the belief that they
would be paid promptly.

Indeed, why should the owners of The Times
191

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

submit to outside influence? They own a large and
prosperous institution, out of debt, which brings
them in all the income they can reasonably require.
Quite aside from moral considerations and the
reluctance which many men feel to sell their souls,
the owners and controllers of The Times have no
particular use for '* British gold," or Wall Street
gold, or any other gold that might be offered for the
control of the paper. They have all the "gold**
necessary for their requirements.

It is perhaps a tribute to the prosperity of The
Times that it is rarely accused of being controlled
by its advertisers. It is accused of about every-
thing else, but this charge would be too obviously
ridiculous. It may be in order to observe, how-
ever, that even in the days when it was struggling
desperately The Times was never controlled by its
advertisers. Certain advertisers, on occasion, may
have made eflTorts to influence the business policy
of the paper. They never succeeded; sometimes
they withdrew their advertising, but they nearly
always came back, and came back know^ing that
they were buying advertising space and nothing
more.

The Times is sometimes called the organ of the
investing classes. The concept of a class organ is
somewhat more familiar in Europe than in the United
States, where about its only true exemplars, aside
from trade journals, can be found in those socialist
papers which speak for the modest number of sec-
tarians who consider themselves the whole working
class. The Thnes can be called the organ of the
investing class only in the sense that most investors

192

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

read it because of the volume and reliability of its
financial news. Because most investors read it, it
is the favored medium for financial advertising.
But financial advertising, like any other advertising,
buys only advertising space. As a matter of fact,
the belief that newspapers as a class are controlled
by their advertisers is a popular delusion not much
more respectable than the belief that breaking a
mirror brings bad luck. Breaking some mirrors does
bring bad luck — in restaurants and barrooms, for
example; and some newspapers may be controlled by
their advertisers. The proportion is considerably
smaller than it was twenty-five years ago, and it is
growing smaller every year.

No, The Times is not owned or controlled by Lord
NorthclifFe or Wall Street bankers or traction in-
terests or the owners of department stores. It is
owned by the men and women whose names appear
in the list of stockholders, officially published every
six months, and controlled by the owner of its ma-
jority stock, Adolph S. Ochs.

As has been said, the ^200,000 obtained by the
sale of bonds for cash was supposed to provide
the working capital for the newspaper. Mr. Ochs
discovered after taking charge that unfunded ob-
ligations of the paper would eat up half that sum.
He had, then, about ^100,000 to go on; and that
is all the fresh capital that has been put into The
Times since 1896. It has paid its way out of its
earnings.

The purpose of the new management was an-
nounced in the following salutatory published on

193

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the editorial page over Mr. Ochs's signature on
August 19, 1896:

To undertake the management of The

New York Times, with its great history
for right-doing, and to attempt to keep
bright the lustre which Henry J. Raymond
and George Jones have given it is an ex-
traordinary task. But if a sincere desire to
conduct a high-standard newspaper, clean,
dignified and trustworthy, requires honesty,
watchfulness, earnestness, industry and
practical knowledge applied with common
sense, I entertain the hope that I can
succeed in maintaining the high estimate
that thoughtful, pure-minded people have
ever had of The New York Times.

It will be my earnest aim that The New
York Times give the news, all the news, in
concise and attractive form, in language
that is parliamentary in good society, and
give it as early, if not earlier, than it can be
learned through any other rehable medium;
to give the news impartially, without fear
or favor, regardless of any party, sect or
interest involved; to make of the columns
of The New York Times a forum for the
consideration of all questions of public
importance, and to that end to invite
intelligent discussion from all shades of
opinion.

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

distinguished The New York Times as a
non-partisan newspaper — unless it be,
if possible, to intensify its devotion to the
cause of sound money and tariff reform,
opposition to wastefulness and peculation
in administering public affairs and in its
advocacy of the lowest tax consistent with
good government, and no more government
than is absolutely necessary to protect
society, maintain individual and vested
rights and assure the free exercise of a
sound conscience.

It will be seen that this platform was in large
degree a reaffirmation of the traditional principles
of The Times, From the ideal of impartiality of
news and of discussion the paper had indeed departed
considerably in its most Republican days, but it had
returned after its declaration of independence in
1884. The emphasis upon certain features of this
newspaper policy, however, was dictated by condi-
tions of the times. Reference to The Times' s
appeal to ^'thoughtful, pure-minded people" and
the promise that news would be given ** earlier than
it can be learned through any other reliable medium"
were the first guns in the aggressive war against
** yellow journalism," which The Times now under-
took, and which it carried through to entire success.
But at the outset that fight seemed all but hopeless.
"Yellow" journalism was a good deal more powerful
in the nineties than today; and it was a good deal
yellower.

Mr. Pulitzer, who had awakened the eighties by
his development of The World, had been followed and
imitated in the early nineties by Mr. Hearst, who

19s

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

made prodigal expenditures of money and was not
hampered by any of the restraints which modified
some of the enterprises of his rival. If in some de-
tails of outward appearance the journals then called
"yellow" are in our day even more excruciating,
their character is not so offensive — and it must be re-
membered, of course, that The World has undergone
such a development in the last two decades that it long
ago lost the character of a "yellow" journal as that
phrase was understood when the "Yellow Kid" car-
toons first brought it into currency. The World and
The Journal in 1896 were considered quite deplorable
from most points of view. But they were prosperous;
they sold for one cent, and had enormous circulations
as circulations went in those days; they made a great
deal of noise about themselves and about each other,
and attracted a corresponding amount of attention;
they spent money wildly for new features, or even
to get news. And they embellished the news with
such unsavory details as are perhaps less often given
to the public today, and in any event are less offen-
sive to the somewhat broader tolerance of our time
than they were in the nineties.

The consequent reaction of a considerable part
of the reading public was very much the same as
forty-five years before, when Raymond had set out to
conduct a paper which should be welcomed into the
homes which found no interest in the trivialities of
The Sun, and were repelled by the vulgarity of The
Herald and by what was regarded as the insidious
immorality of The Tribune, A good many homes,
schools and clubs deliberately excluded The World
and The Journal in 1896; but their fierce rivalry,

196

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

their reckless expenditure, and even in some degree
the quality of the brains which they had been able
to obtain, gave them a certain advantage over their
competitors. Of the other papers of the period, The
Sun was brilliantly written, and was read chiefly
by people who liked brilliant writing. It printed
as much news as its reporters and correspondents,
in the pressure of more important business, had time
to get, and as its make-up men found it necessary
to admit to the columns as an off^set to literature.
Aside from that, its energies were principally devoted
to the contentions that New Yorkers could never
be persuaded to ride in subway trains, and that
Whitelaw Reid had driven Horace Greeley to the
madhouse and the grave. The Herald was a daily
directory, had an excellent foreign service, but
otherwise had no particular claim on the attention
of readers unless they happened to be interested
in the doings of a somewhat curiously defined
"society'' or in premature burial, dogs, and more
dubious topics of interest. The Tribune carried a
small but genteel stock of Republican ideas, most of
which had lain for a considerable time on the shelves.
There was room for a paper whose first object was
to get the news promptly and publish it with due
attention to its relative value — a paper so conducted
that nobody need be ashamed to be seen reading it,
but containing all the solid content which intelligent
readers wanted, and for which, in desperation, they
sometimes had to burrow in the muck heaps of the
"yellows.'*

This ideal of The Tirnes was presently expressed
in the motto "All the News That's Fit to Print,"

197

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

first published on the editorial page on October 25,
1896, and carried in a box on the front page from
February 10 of the following year down to the pres-
ent day. Probably no newspaper motto has ever
aroused more discussion or more obstinate difference
of opinion — a difference, it may be observed,
which is to be found in The Times office as w^ell as
outside. In its most literal and narrowest inter-
pretation it of course suggests that terrible crime
widely discussed under the title of "suppression of
news." This phrase itself is something of a begging
of the question, for no newspaper is large enough to
publish accounts of all happenings even if anybody
would read them. In every newspaper office every
day there must be a selection of the most interesting
or important happenings, as many of them as can
be crowded into the paper. In the sense that the
less interesting or important items have to be left
out there is ** suppression of news'' in every news-
paper office all the time, as many self-admiring
persons have discovered.

"All the News That's Fit to Print," however,
has been criticised, even by more or less friendly
commentators, as implying the exercise of editorial
judgment as to what news may be too horrible or
obscene for the public — a right which, it is assumed,
no editor possesses. But no newspaper ever pub-
lished all the harrowing details of the Armenian
massacres, for instance. The essential facts were
published; the decorative trimmings could well be
left to the imagination. It has been argued that
if it is news of sufficient importance it is fit to print.
The Times has never held otherwise. The fact of

198

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

an atrocious crime or a deplorable scandal is news.
The sordid particulars have sometimes a legitimate
news value, but more often their only appeal is to
the salacious curiosity.

The motto has often been contrasted with Dana's
remark that "whatever Divine Providence permits
to occur I am not too proud to report." But there
are certain details of events permitted by Divine
Providence which have never been and will never be
printed in The Sun, even though mention of the
events in a general way may be published as news.
It is a question of methods, of treatment, of emphasis
— a fact which may easily be proved by the protests
which The Times often receives against items pub-
lished in its columns which seem to some of its
readers unfit to print. There is often a difference of
opinion among editors of The Times as to whether
the unassailable general principle that what is
news should be printed justifies the inclusion of cer-
tain details which are of dubious fitness; and no
doubt the practice of the paper occasionally fails
to agree altogether with this excellent principle.
But the influence of the motto is present none the
less. It has been described as "a silent monitor
at the copy desk''; and in the course of years its
influence has been sufficient to keep a good deal
of contaminating and worthless material out of the
paper.

If it be held that a doctrine so difficult to define
precisely is a rather unsafe guide, it should be re-
membered that it was first adopted in somewhat
unusual circumstances. In eff'ect, *'A11 the News
That's Fit to Print" was a war cry, the slogan under

199

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

which the reorganized Times fought for a footing
against the formidable competition of The Herald,
The World and The Journal. What it meant, in
essence, was that The Times was going to be as
good a vehicle of news as any of those papers, and
that it would be free from their indecency, eccen-
tricity, distortion or sensationalism. The publisher
of The Times once answered a question as to what
news is unfit to print with the brief definition,
"What's untrue/' A great deal of the so-called news
published by some of The Times^s contemporaries
in 1896 was untrue — sometimes, though not very
often, deliberately invented; more frequently mis-
handled, edited or colored until it conveyed an
entirely inaccurate impression. There was to be
none of this sort of thing in The Times, and so far as
its editors are humanly able to live up to their good
intentions, there never has been. Moreover, the
columns of The Times were not to be filled with
matter which depended for its interest to the public
purely on its appeal to prurient cravings or to un-
warranted suspicion. The motto selected in 1896
might have been restated as **The news, all the
news and nothing but the news.'' This was the
sort of paper, and the only sort of paper, which the
new publisher of The Times would or could produce;
it was still to be seen whether he was right in believ-
ing that New York in the nineties offered a living
for such a paper, and the experiment was begun
under a heavy handicap — with an outworn plant,
a tradition of misfortune and a discouraged staft,
to say nothing of the general opinion that the new
venture had little chance of success.

200

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

The new publisher was quite as well aware as
anybody else of the difficulties which he had to face,
but he was of the opinion that there were some
counterbalancing advantages which had been over-
looked by some of the men who had thought The
Times beyond hope of recovery. In the first place,
it did have a great tradition. Within the memory
of many thousands of newspaper readers — indeed
until a few years previously — it had been one
of the great newspapers of the country. Its name
and standing had by no means been destroyed by
its comparatively brief period of misfortune. In
a sense, the good will was still there.

It was not on the surface, of course; it would have
to be dug out and cultivated, as the experience of the
previous management showed. Nevertheless, the
gentlemen who had sold the name and good will of
the paper for a million dollars in 1893 had, perhaps,
given better value than they realized. The Times
had fallen into a situation from which it could work
out only by showing merit, but once that merit was
shown it would find a welcome in many homes
where it had been a valued friend in the past. A
new paper with a new name would have had to spend
an enormous amount of money to establish this
friendly disposition which the new management
of The Times would find ready to welcome it — if
The Times could succeed in recovering the attention
of these readers.

And it should be observed that the reconstruction
of The Times involved no change in the essential
character of the paper. The new pubHsher indulged
in no eccentric experiments, no efforts to emulate

201

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

prominent and profitable features of rival publica-
tions. It is perhaps fortunate that his capital was so
small, for he did not have the money to do this sort
of thing, even if he had wanted to. He felt that the
chief asset of The Times was its character, its tradi-
tion, its good will. That character was to be pre-
served. The remnant of old readers who continued
to buy The Ti7nes because they liked that kind of
paper were not to be driven away by any sudden
alteration of the paper's character in the vain effort
to emulate its competitors. The Times was to be
the same kind of paper as of old, a kind of paper
which a large part of the reading public was known
to like; the changes under the new management were
intended only to make it a better paper of that kind.
Another item of value was the paper's staff.
The new publisher intended to make no changes
unless experience showed him that change was
necessary, for he had a high admiration for the
staff as he found it. Indeed, the men then getting
out The Times were, on the whole, the men who had
produced and edited it in the days of its greatness.
They were no longer getting the results which they
had got then; but this was due to a complex of
reasons in which the inexperience of the heirs of
George Jones, the bad luck of their successors in
taking over the paper without any working capital
on the eve of a financial panic, and the lack of a
sound business organization were most important.
Given even a little breathing space from importunate
financial obligations, and a somewhat better direc-
tion of energy, and they could make it a great paper
once more.

202

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

Nevertheless, the situation was bad enough.
When Mr. Ochs assumed the control of The Times ,
an old and trusted employe, to whom had been con-
fided some of the details of the paper's management
too painful to be widely disseminated, took him into
his office, unlocked his rolltop desk, and with tears
in his eyes imparted to the new publisher his shame-
ful secret. The Times was printing 19,000 copies
a day, and 10,000 of them were coming back unsold.
The net circulation was 9000, and it was growing
smaller every day. Mr. Ochs said something to the
effect that he thought the circulation would be
increased before long. '* Increased!" said his as-
tounded hearer. ** Increased! Mr. Ochs, if you
could keep it from going down any further you'd be
a wonderful man."

However, the new pubhsher set to work to see
what he could do. One item of waste which was
soon reduced, though it was a long time before it was
entirely eliminated, was the printing of papers that
came back to the office old paper bin from the news
stands where they had vainly waited for purchasers.
While staying in New York and making arrange-
ments for the purchase of The Times Mr. Ochs had
noticed that at the news stand he patronized he was
always offered The Sun, At first he felt rather
flattered at the idea that the keen-eyed newsdealer
had judged him to be the sort of man who would
want The Sun; for this was in the height of Dana's
fame as a producer of newspaper literature, and to
be seen reading The Sun was, at that time, a mark of
intellectual distinction. But inquiry discovered that
the newsdealer was actuated by a more sordid

203

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

motive. The Sun circulation system allowed no
returns; and in consequence the first thing the news-
dealer thought of was to sell off his stock of Suns,
When they were gone he could turn to the distribu-
tion of the other papers with the restful assurance
that such copies as he could not sell could be sent
back to the office and would cost him nothing. It
seemed to Mr. Ochs, upon reflection, that the papers
which permitted the return of unsold copies were in
effect supplying the capital for the promotion of
The Sun.

So The Times first reduced the return privilege to
lO per cent, presently abolished it entirely for the
Saturday issue with the literary supplement, and
eventually eliminated it altogether. Thereafter the
bills for print paper could be paid with the consoling
assurance that, at any rate. The Times was paid for
every copy sent out to the newsdealers. Meanwhile
the new pubKsher had been finding his way about the
office. He had the idea that the essentials of success-
ful newspaper publishing were pretty much the
same in New York and in Chattanooga; that, as he
afterward expressed it, the best policy was '*no
poHcy" — a rehance on honesty, industry and un-
hampered judgment. In time this doctrine proved
its worth by its practical success, but it seemed so
strange at the time that years afterward the editor
of another New York paper said that Mr. Ochs had
come to town and '* taught us something new." It
did not seem so to him; he thought he had merely
reminded New York newspaper men of something
they had forgotten.

In a sense, of course, that statement could be
204

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

applied to the rise of almost any successful news-
paper. Perhaps the history of journalism could be
expressed in a formula of rotary motion. Every
twenty years or so somebody achieves a great success
by digging up an old truth that had been discarded.
One truth rediscovered on The Times in the nineties,
however, has perhaps a more generally useful applica-
tion than the secrets of the success of other news-
papers. This is the ancient but still somewhat
surprising fact that thorough knowledge and un-
remitting dihgence are likely, barring accident, to
bring results. The new publisher of The Times,
who had come from the interior of the country to
undertake the solution of a problem which to veterans
of New York journalism seemed entirely hopeless,
was regarded by a good many observers as a man
with more money than brains — a judgment which, in
view of the actual state of his fortunes, was anything
but complimentary. But he knew every department
of the newspaper business from the ground up.

It was his opinion that The Times staff, as it then
existed, was as competent and well equipped a body
of men as could be found on any newspaper in the
country, and that the paper could be rehabilitated
by those men. What they needed was more co-
ordination and a little more enthusiasm. Too many
of the subordinates had allowed themselves to slip
into a groove and were conducting their own particu-
lar duties in a routine grown familiar with years of
practice without paying much attention to the
relation of their work to the whole. Men were apt
to stick to themselves and ignore what went on
about them.

205

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The arrival of the new publisher brought a good
deal of encouragement to men at the top who had
become acquainted with him and had caught some-
thing of his enthusiasm, but for most of the staff
enthusiasm had to wait for acquaintance. When Mr.
Ochs came in with the intention of turning The Times
around and starting it uphill the majority of the
staff watched him with interest, but at first without
any great amount of confidence. He was a new man
and unknown, and he had undertaken a job which
seemed to be too much for anybody. He was wel-
come, because the ruin of the paper, without some
new stimulus, seemed only a question of time; but
it was still to be seen if he could give it that stimulus.

As for the pubhsher, he experienced a certain
difl&dence as he began to famiHarize himself with his
new associates. He was now set as commanding
officer over men, a good many of them older than
himself, of whom he had been hearing for years with
a certain amount of awe. These great names of
New York journalism had resounded rather thunder-
ously in Chattanooga, and it required a considerable
time for Mr. Ochs to get over his conviction that they
were persons of a somewhat different order of pro-
fessional eminence, or that, at any rate, they were
New Yorkers, while he was fresh from a small town.
Nevertheless, he set to work to invigorate the staff,
to inspire it with new courage, and to find out in the
meantime what was the matter with The Times.
Much was done from the very first in bringing the
members of the staff together; but it may serve as an
illustration of the necessity of beginning pretty
much from the ground up that the pubhsher found

206

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

that one of his first tasks was to educate the staff
into reading the paper.

They were induced to read The Tifnes by the
somewhat roundabout expedient of giving to each
man the task of comparing each day's issue of The
Times with one of its contemporaries. The pub-
Hsher had discovered that the writers had preferences
among the other morning papers, and he assigned
each man to find out every morning what his pet
paper had discovered that was unknown to The
Times, It perhaps goes without saying that this
task of comparison was already part of the work of
the news department; it was laid upon the editorial
council for purely educational reasons. And it
worked. Before long the men who were reading
The Times because they had to know if it had been
beaten on the day's news found themselves compelled
to admit that there was a good deal in it that was

worth reading. , • i u j

This instance may illustrate the work which had
to be done in coordinating the work of the various
members of The Times stafF. The work was done, be-
cause there was a directing influence to see that it was
done; and before long The Times had an organization,
still rudimentary, but more deserving of the name
than anything it had ever known before. There
was a man at the head who understood the work
of every department from his own experience, and
who not only knew whether that work was being
well done, but had been able to inspire the workers
with a more vivid interest in the welfare of the whole
institution. And another element in their confi-
dence, perhaps of slower growth, was the realiza-

207

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tion that the new chief was in complete and abso-
lute control, unhampered by any external influences
whatever. It is unfortunately true that outside
influence on many newspapers has been — a past
tense is used because this condition though still
existing in some newspaper offices, is much less
general now than it used to be — so strong that
a good many newspaper men of wide experience
find it hard to believe that it is not universal.
The Times has had a good deal of difficulty in
persuading some of its employes that news is not
to be handled in deference to editorial policy, just
as it had trouble in the nineties in convincing them
that news was not to be treated with a view to the
supposed prejudices of influential outsiders. The
new publisher was to a certain extent regarded for
a time as the representative of the men who had
sunk their money in The Times a few years before;
and it took time for the employes to realize that he
was conducting it himself, without any orders from
outside. When they did realize it, as he took care
they should, it gave a tremendous impetus to the
industry of a staff* which had been afraid of shadows
for some time past, and now at last began to realize
that they were only shadows.

Meanwhile there had been some experiments
with the contents of The Times. Certain depart-
ments had continued for years by the force of in-
ertia, and it was suspected by the new publisher
that they no longer served any useful purpose. One
of the daily features of the paper was a feuilleton,
which Mr. Ochs suppressed as soon as he took charge.
The paper happened on that dav to be publishing the

208

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

next to the last instalment of a continued story.
Mr. Ochs did not want fiction, and he insisted that
the story stop right there, but was persuaded to let
the concluding chapters appear next day.

It is true that the largest newspaper circulation
in the world has been built up by the Petit Parisien
on the basis of serial fiction and human interest, and
it is true that even so dignified a paper as the Temps
lately gave up much of its scanty space to the serial
publication of Florence Barclay's novel, "The Ros-
ary." But, aside from the question of the differ-
ence in French and American ideas of a newspaper,
it must be remembered that the American institu-
tion of the popular fiction magazine is unknown in
France. The newspapers are both newspapers and
fiction magazines, in effect. Whatever may or may
not have been the increment in circulation gained
by various American newspaper magazine sections
through the publication of fiction, it may be doubted
if any American paper ever accomplished much by
printing fiction in its daily issue, unless it be that
peculiar type of fiction which is written for and
found only upon the woman's page of evening news-
papers. At any rate. The Times never suffered from
its abandonment of the popular fiction field to the
new venture of Mr. McClure, which was just then
opening a new epoch in American magazine history.

Another department which was abolished was the
detailed report of prices in the commodity markets.
Again Mr. Ochs found dissent from his opinion that
these had no place in The Times, and that people
who were interested in this item were a good deal
more likely to get it out of the trade papers. So

209

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

strong was the opposition of the circulation depart-
ment to the abandonment of this feature that the
pubHsher finally decided to try dropping out these
reports a little at a time. A stick here and a stick
there, the space given to commodity markets was
reduced without any expected clamors of protest from
readers who had learned to look for it every morning.
At last, when four whole columns of what is techni-
cally known as "punk" had been excised from the
paper. The Times did hear from a subscriber at
Haverstraw, who wrote that he missed the quota-
tions on naval stores. And that was all. It was
demonstrated to be a sheer waste of valuable space.
Some of this material eventually found its way
back into the paper, but in better form. Where the
new management found a legitimate field of the news
which existing papers had left uncovered it took up
and gave some attention to it, but there was to be
no more competition with trade journals on their
own ground. And when "punk" came back, the
deadening routine which had gradually deprived
these old departments of their usefulness had dis-
appeared. It is probable that by the publication
of the complete court calendars, for instance. The
Times has gained a considerable number of readers,
and the great development of the page of business
news, which began early in the history of the present
administration but grew gradually through many
years, has made The Times the favorite daily of
many men in businesses which are served by extraor-
dinarily good trade papers. But the entire process,
both of subtraction and of addition, has been a
matter of special judgment in individual cases. If

2IO

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

an existing department seemed to be serving no use-
ful purpose, it went out; if the addition of a new
department promised to justify the effort and ex-
pense, it was introduced. How to decide what was
needed and what could be abolished? Well, it is
betraying no trade secret to say that this was a
matter of judgment based on experience.

But the mere cutting out of dead wood was only
a part, and a small part, of the work. The rise
from 9000 to 3 50,000 was not accomplished by mere
elimination of useless items, nor by tightening up
the business office, estabhshing a sound accounting
system and cutting losses. There had to be some
positive achievements. One of the most useful of
these was the wide advertisement of the policy ex-
pressed in the motto, "All the News That's Fit to
Print." That motto, when adopted, aroused a good
deal of discussion which was fostered and abetted
by the management of the paper. For some months
a huge electric sign at Twenty-third Street and
Broadway made known to the passing throng the
legend of The Times, There were some editorial ex-
positions of the ideals expressed by the motto, and
after these had made Times readers famihar with the
intentions of the new publisher a prize of ^100 was
offered for any ten-word motto which seemed bet-
ter to express those ideals. Richard Watson Gilder,
editor of the Century ^ was asked to act as judge in
the contest, which brought out some 20,000 sug-
gestions, of which 1 50 were thought good enough to
publish. The prize was given to **A11 the World's
News, but Not a School for Scandal"; but to the
editors of The Times this did not seem as satisfac-

211

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tory as their own device, so though the inventor
of this motto got his $ioo, **A11 the News That's
Fit to Print" continued to be the motto of the
paper. All this attracted a certain amount of at-
tention to the new methods on an old paper, and
a certain number of readers were drawn to buy The
Times and find out what all the disturbance was
about. It is hardly necessary to say that the ad-
vertisement would have been useless if they had not
discovered, on examining The Times, that it was
living up to its promises; that it was giving the
news and presenting it with sanity and decency.

Meanwhile some new and valuable features had
been added to the paper. The first of these, and
one of the most important, was the illustrated Sun-
day magazine, first published as part of the Sunday
paper on September 6, 1896, three weeks after Mr.
Ochs took control. Newspaper Sunday magazines
in that day were distinguished chiefly by the so-
called comic supplement — a feature which The
Times has never had, never needed, and never de-
sired. The magazine section, in the narrower sense
of the word, was also influenced chiefly by the "y^l"
low" journals; the type is still represented by some
belated survivals, rather less flamboyant than
twenty-five years ago. Against this The Times
oflPered a pictorial supplement printed on good coated
paper and illustrated with half-tone photographs.
It was as great an advance in its day as the more
recent rotogravure pictorial supplement, and it gave
a real illustrated news magazine to the New York
newspaper public.

This magazine was popular from the very first.
212

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

Perhaps its greatest accomplishment was the publi-
cation of the pictures of Queen Victoria's jubilee in
1897. Fifty photographs of the procession on June
22 were bought at 10 guineas apiece from the offi-
cial photographer and rushed to New York; and on
July 4 The Times Illustrated Magazine published
sixteen pages of them. They were not only pub-
lished in The Times before any other New York paper
had them, but they were well printed so that the
reader could see what they were — something which
a reproduction on ordinary newsprint could hardly
have accomplished. That feat, which cost altogether
^5000 — a considerable sum to The Times of 1897
— is still remembered in the office as one of the first
of a long series of beats, and it added greatly to the
reputation of the illustrated magazine. But week
in and week out that magazine was widely prized;
and when it was discontinued in September, 1899,
after three years of existence, chiefly because The
Times had attained so large a circulation that the
magazine could no longer be produced by the inade-
quate plant then available, it left a good many
mourners, who only in recent years have found an
adequate substitute in the present pictorial and mag-
azine supplements of the Sunday paper.

Perhaps the most important service of that maga-
zine in the long run was its effect on other news-
papers, many of which were inspired to imitate it.
This was true in a still higher degree of the next
feature of the rejuvenated Times — the Saturday Re-
view of Books, first published on October 10, 1896,
and edited then and long afterward by Francis W.
Halsey. In this publication was carried out an idea

213

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

of the publisher of The Times that a newspaper book
review should be a literary newspaper, treating
newly published books as news and containing be-
sides other news of literary happenings. While open
to criticism from several standpoints, the treating of
books as news is certainly more in accordance with
the function of a daily newspaper, as well as some-
what easier to do well, than more serious effort at
literary criticism. And in The Times Saturday Re-
view the news of the literary world was assembled and
presented better than ever before in an American daily.
Moreover, the new tabloid form, with the excellent
typography and good quality of paper used, attracted
the attention of readers to book news which they
might have passed by in the columns of the regular
edition.

As an example of the conviction of students of
Hterature that it did meet a long-felt want may be
cited the action of Professor C. Alphonso Smith,
then at the Louisiana State University, who required
all members of some of his classes in English Hterature
to take The Times Book Review in order to keep up
with current events in the literary field. This pub-
Hcation, too, has since been imitated, and in some
instances improved upon, but in 1896 it was a new
idea which once more made the New York public
realize that something was happening on The Times.
Its ultimate service to the cause of book reviewing
in the United States — a cause which still needs all
the help it can get, but which is considerably better
off than it was in 1896 — was perhaps even greater
than its contribution to the well-being of The Ti^nes.

For a considerable time, indeed, it seemed that
214

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

this new publication was to be a gratuitous and dis-
interested contribution to American letters. It
found immediate favor with readers, but not with
advertisers. Book publishers argued that when the
book reviews were embodied in the regular news
columns of the paper, as had previously been the
custom, they and the adjacent advertising would be
seen by the general reader; whereas if they were
segregated in a special supplement they would re-
ceive the attention only of the limited and presum-
ably impecunious section of the reading pubhc which
was interested in books. Only very slowly did the
publishers realize that people who were interested in
books were more likely to buy books when they had
any money to buy them with than those who irri-
tably turned over the sheet in order to escape from
the book reviews to the sporting news on the next
page. After the first pubKsher tried the experi-
ment of advertising in the Book Review others soon
followed, and before long the publication was pay-
ing its way.

There were disadvantages about the publication of
the literary supplement on Saturday. It had to
be in the form of loose sheets, folded into the
rest of the paper. If the reader did not want the
Book Review he merely opened up the paper and
let the sheets flutter out — and they fluttered well.
The Saturday morning paper, naturally, was read by
people on their way downtown to work. Those who
didn't care to carry the Book Review about with
them — they rarely failed to "look over" it — let it
blow away in the wind, so one morning the man-
agement of The Times was attracted, and rather ag-

215

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

grieved, by a cartoon in Life entitled **The Littery
Supplement," and depicting a citizen desperately try-
ing to struggle out of an elevated station through a
heap of discarded sheets of The Times Saturday
Book Review.

This was publicity, though not of the most favor-
able sort; but it was finally decided that the Book
Review would go better with the Sunday paper, in
most instances delivered at the home, where it could
be conveniently laid aside for reading at leisure.
Once more, however, the book publishers were dis-
turbed by the change. Some of them had scruples
against advertising in a Sunday paper. One or two
publishers held out for a little while and insisted on
advertising only in the regular issue of Saturday;
but their rivals soon began to get results which
gradually drew all the book advertising into the Book
Review supplement to the Sunday edition.

The more recent history of The Times Book Re-
view is another matter. Superficially, its combina-
tion with the magazine section may seem to be a
reversal of the principle on which the literary sup-
plement was originally separated from the body of
the paper; but the present-day Book Review and
Magazine is still in a process of development whose
event, it is hoped, will justify the belief of the man-
agement of The Times that a still better literary
newspaper is attainable than has ever yet been pro-
duced. If the history of the various transforma-
tions of The Times literary supplement shows any-
thing, it shows that books are, generally speaking?
bought by the people who like to read about books;
and that hterary advertising will bring results if

216

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

placed alongside literary news, wherever that may be.

Still another feature was added to The Times on
November 8, 1897, in the weekly financial review
which was published for a number of years there-
after as a supplement to the Monday morning paper.
Each of these additions to the paper brought new
readers, and others were constantly being attracted
by the slow and steady improvement of the quality
of the paper.

Another innovation of the new management was
the giving over of much of the space allotted to
letters from readers to the views of those who dis-
agreed with the editorial opinions of the paper. This
was not wholly a novelty in American journalism,
but The Times now began to do it on a scale previ-
ously unknown. Not so very many years before
1896 most American newspapers {The Times among
them) had been reluctant to print even news which
did not accord with editorial poHcy. That time had
passed, and the new management of The Times now
made a point of opening its columns to the presen-
tation of views on any side of any subject, as a
matter of news and as a contribution to the forma-
tion of well-grounded opinion. Almost all decent
newspapers do that now, but it was a novelty in
the nineties.

It has, perhaps, some perils; certain inveterate
self-advertisers have nothing to do but flood the
columns of all newspapers with their letters, and if
the editors occasionally feel that other people have
a right to be heard these correspondents at once
conclude that they are being suppressed for un-
worthy reasons. Also, if a book review opens its

217

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

correspondence page to all comers, that page is likely
to be filled with complaints from authors who feel
that the reviewers did not do justice to their works.
Nevertheless, the practice is now universally recog-
nized as useful and necessary, an opinion which was
a rarity in the days when The Times first began to
invite letters from people who disagreed with it.

The editorial page was as good as ever. In the
campaign of 1896, when the paper supported the
Gold Democratic ticket of Palmer and Buckner,
The Times^s editorial arguments for sound money
were powerful and effective. The publisher and the
editors took the issues of that campaign so seriously
that they all marched in the great gold parade, the
biggest New York had ever known; and they had
the satisfaction of feeling at the end of the cam-
paign that The Times^s editorial attitude had counted
for a good deal in the sound money discussion.
The improvement of the news columns in the direc-
tion of impartiality, which had made much progress
since the secession of The Times from the Republi-
can Party, was carried still further under a new
pubHsher who was interested in politics only as an
external observer and good citizen. The loss of
subscribers had been stopped; in the first year and
a half of the new management the circulation had
more than doubled; and the deficit was now rapidly
approaching the vanishing point.

Advertising was coming to the paper in increasing
amounts. It had been the boast of Mr. Jones that
no man had ever been asked to subscribe to The
Times or to advertise in The Times, If he chose to
do either, that was his own affair; but nobody

218

LOUIS WILEY,
Business Manager.

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

would give him any provocation. Whatever the
merits or demerits of this attitude, the time for it
had passed by 1896. If a newspaper owner of that
period chose to regard his paper as something which
he pubhshed for his own personal pleasure there was
considerable danger that the public would respect
his reticence. The new management of The Times
had space to sell for legitimate advertising, which
in its opinion would satisfy the purchaser and give
him his money's worth, and they did not regard it
as beneath their dignity to tell him about it.

Nevertheless, certain types of advertising were
from the first carefully excluded. While not all
patent medicines are kept out of The Times^s ad-
vertising columns, the rules adopted under the new
management were so strict that almost all of this
matter was automatically rejected. Patent medi-
cine advertising was much more general, of course,
twenty-five years ago; today it survives in a few
metropolitan journals of somewhat antediluvian
standards, and is a welcome guest of many publi-
cations in the smaller towns. Some of it is legiti-
mate advertising, but so much of it is not that The
Thyies felt that its publication could do no good,
while in many instances it did positive harm.

Word puzzles and similar schemes in which prizes
were offered for something which looked easy, but
was generally impossible of accomplishment, were
also excluded. Persons who offered something for
nothing, who guaranteed the cure of illnesses or the
payment of large dividends, also found themselves
compelled to display their wares in other papers.
It was and is the conviction of the pubHsher of The

219

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Times that honesty is the best poHcy, and that busi-
ness success cannot be securely founded on misrep-
resentation and fraud. There is doubtless a consid-
erable part of the public which will always be too
stupid to know that it is being deceived, or too list-
less to care; but The Times was not aiming at that
class of readers.

It has sometimes been objected that discrimina-
tion against objectionable advertising should logically
be carried to the point of investigating all advertis-
ing before publication. The Times does not do this.
It does investigate all advertisements as to which it
has any reason to entertain suspicion; and if the
suspicion remains after investigation, even though
nothing is proved, the reader is given the benefit of
the doubt and the advertising is excluded. The
principles above mentioned result in the wholesale
exclusion from The Times of those classes of adver-
tisements in which there is most likely to be mis-
representation. In other fields a sharp watch is
maintained for fraudulent advertising, with results
which may be fully appreciated if The Times\^ finan-
cial advertising, for example, be compared with that
of some of its contemporaries.

Elimination of questionable material is, of course,
considerably easier in financial than in mercantile
advertising. In this latter field it has seemed to
The Times that the exercise of ordinary vigilance is
about all that can be expected of a newspaper. The
newspaper may do a good deal in the suppression of
improper claims by advertisers, but it cannot do all
the reader's thinking.

Two instances of rejection of advertising by The
220

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

Times, very early in the history of the present man-
agement, deserve special notice. As permitted,
though not enjoined, by the election laws of 1896,
the Board of Aldermen in that year voted that the
complete canvass of the vote in the city should be
published in six daily newspapers. The Times was
one of the six papers selected, but it promptly at-
tacked the decision as a waste of public money and
urged that pubhcation be confined to the one paper
mandatory under the law — which would not have
been The Times. This report was of enormous vol-
ume, and its publication, at the ordinary rates, would
have brought to every paper carrying it some ^33,600
— a total of over ^200,000. The Times needed $33,-
600 rather badly just then, but it decHned the
advertisement in an editorial which called the elec-
tion canvass '*a waste of pubHc money." The mem-
bers of the Board of Aldermen professed to be
startled and horrified by the discovery that the ex-
pense would be so heavy. Certainly they were
horrified by this proclamation to the public that
so much money was being thrown away, and the
publication was finally reduced to the smallest
amount permitted by law, none of which came to
The Times — a result, of course, which had been ex-
pected.

Some months later all the regular advertising of
the city government was unexpectedly offered to
The Times. This amounted to about $150,000 a
year, a sum which would have made a tremendous
difference to The Times of that period. Moreover,
assurances were brought to the management of the
paper by a gentleman who was a friend both of the

221

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

publisher and of the Tammany leaders that this offer
was made with absolutely no strings. It was neither
the expectation nor the desire of Tammany that
The Times should feel itself influenced in any way,
and it was understood that the allotment of the
advertising did not in any way involve a modifica-
tion of The Times^s general hostility to Tammany in
local politics. The only reason for this sudden wind-
fall, said the gentleman who brought the news, was
the conviction of the Tammany leaders that it was
a good thing for the general interests of the Demo-
cratic Party to have a conservative Democratic
paper maintained in New York Cit}^ That paper's
feelings about Tammany did not enter into the case.

The publisher of The Times had entire confidence
in the good faith of the gentleman who gave him
these assurances, and saw no need for questioning
the good faith of the Tammany leaders. For
whether or not their intentions were honorable,
their proposal was unacceptable. It was asking too
much of human nature to suppose that thereafter
when The Times had reason to attack Tammany,
as it certainly would (its exposures of graft pay-
ments for gambling-house protection were not very
far in the future), the subconscious, if not the con-
scious minds of those in The Tifnes office might be
aflPected by the thought that ^150,000 was at stake.
By that time the paper might have got accustomed
to living on a higher scale, and would have missed
the ^150,000 more than if it had never had it. More-
over, The Times was still far behind its rivals in cir-
culation. If this considerable revenue were suddenly
awarded to the smallest in circulation of New York

222

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

morning papers, everybody would believe that Tam-
many had bought The Times, no matter how pure
the motives of the organization or of the paper's
management. The shadow was as bad as the sub-
stance, in this case; from any point of view the offer
was unacceptable.

Years later, in Mayor McClellan's administration,
The Times was designated for a large part of the city
advertising — the greater part mandatory in con-
nection with condemnation proceedings in the mat-
ter of the Ashokan water supply. By that time the
paper's circulation was large, and was growing by
leaps and bounds. Its revenues were also large and
increasing; there could no longer be any serious sus-
picion that The Times had reason to sell its soul for
advertising patronage, and its selection as an adver-
tising medium was a natural choice, for that selec-
tion had in the meantime been made by great num-
bers of private advertisers who had found that ad-
vertising in The Times would sell their goods.

Principles of this sort temporarily cost the paper
a good deal of money. But on the whole it was
fighting its way slowly back to prosperity. In its
antagonism to "yellow" journalism it was beginning
to find a good many friends. It was not alone in its
attack upon the methods of The Journal and The
World; The Sun and The Press, for example, made
much more of a crusade out of it. But their effort
was chiefly destructive; they devoted a good deal of
space to attacks upon the personalities and prac-
tices of the "yellow" press. The Times was less con-
cerned in holding up to the public view infamies
already quite apparent to those who were capable

223

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

of being disturbed by them than in demonstrating to
persons who did not like "yellow'* journalism that
The Times was the sort of paper they wanted.

The "yellows" fought back, of course. The World
graciously referred to some of its journalistic critics
as "doomed rats strugghng in a pit," and endeavored
to make it clear that a monopoly of journaUstic
purity was possessed by The World. In The World's
opinion. The Times was owned by the trusts; it had
been bought up by Wall Street speculators for their
own selfish purposes. The basis of this legend,
started in a quarter where it would probably be
promptly repudiated today, was the very moderate
amount of obligations of The Times held by certain
bankers mentioned in the earher part of this chap-
ter. The World, o( course, saw some advantages in
circulating the suspicion that Mr. Ochs was not solely
directing The Times, and it chose to regard him,
and to speak of him, as "caretaker of the deficit."

The Times was making its way, slowly, but with
increasing sureness among those who were disturbed
by the tendencies of The World and The Journal. It
was advertised by the assertion that "It does not soil
the breakfast cloth." And this negative virtue no
less than its positive excellences was winning it
new readers all the time. Mr. Jason Rogers of The
New York Globe has said that "If ever a newspaper
was built brick upon brick, through the recommen-
dation of one reader to a friend who was not yet
reading. The New York Times was so built." This
description, which could be generally applied to the
growth of The Times in the last twenty-five years, is
especially accurate as a description of the paper's

224

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

recovery in its first year and a half under the new
management. It might have gone on growing at
this steady pace, with no sudden mutations of for-
tune, had it not been for an event which, if not ex-
actly unforeseen, could hardly have been provided
against, which subjected the paper to an almost
ruinous strain, and put it in jeopardy from which
there was no escape but by the desperate expedient
that, almost overnight, made its fortune. This
event was the Spanish War.

The very first issue of The Times, on September
1 8, 1 85 1, had carried an editorial on the Cuban
question. Crittenden's filibusters, who had gone to
aid the Lopez rebellion, had lately been captured and
shot, and the rising itself had been put down. The
Times saw in the failure of the Lopez rising proof
that the Cubans did not want independence, and it
opposed the annexationist agitation of that day on
very sohd grounds. For of course the Cuban ques-
tion, in the fifties, was only part of the larger ques-
tion of the slave empire of the Golden Circle. An-
nexation was desired by those who wanted another
slave state, and opposed in the North precisely be-
cause that was the motive of those who wanted it.
Even the article above referred to took a couple of
paragraphs to explain that Americans would al-
ways sympathize with any people struggling to be
free.

By 1898 the Cuban question was on a wholly dif-
ferent basis. Cuba was no longer a partisan interest
in American politics, nor was there any doubt as to
the popular support of the revolution which had be-

225

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

gun in 1895. The Times had held in Cleveland's
Administration, and in the first year of McKinley's,
that the distress and disorder in the island must be
ended, and that if they could not be ended by Spain
on a basis satisfactory to Cuba there might be
need of American intervention. As the situation
became more critical The Tifties editorial page dis-
cussed the right of intervention according to inter-
national law, coming to the conclusion that the
United States Government would undoubtedly be
justified in taking that step, should it prove impos-
sible to settle the Cuban question by other means,
on the ground of safeguarding the peace and safety
of our own people who could not be persuaded to
sit quietly by while the Cubans were fighting for
freedom. President McKinley afterward acknowl-
edged that these articles had been of great value in
helping him to clarify his own views about the rights
and duties of our Government in the crisis. In the
weeks leading up to the declaration of war The
Times had maintained a temperate attitude, hoping
that some satisfactory solution might be reached
without hostilities, but insisting that the Cuban
question must now be settled, and finally settled.
When the course of the war brought unexpected ac-
quisitions of territory in the Pacific and the Carib-
bean, The Times could see little merit in the argu-
ments of the anti-imperialists. In its opinion there
was not much use talking about the desirability of
expansion. Expansion had happened; it had come
as an incident in an apparently inevitable historical
development; and it had to be accepted as a fact.
Mr. Bryan's zealous anti-imperialism only rein-

226

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

forced in the minds of the editors of The Times the
impression that his attitude on the currency had al-
ready created, and his personaHty and the two major
issues which he had selected led The Times to give
its support to the Republican Presidential ticket in
1900, for the first time in sixteen years.

But if The Times's editorial reaction to the issues
of the Spanish War honorably carried on the tradi-
tions of the paper's history, the other departments
found the war all but disastrous. Advertising fell
off ruinously in the spring and summer of 1898,
when a good many excitable persons expected to be
awakened any morning by the roar of Cervera's
guns bombarding Coney Island. This loss, borne
by all the papers, naturally fell with particular
weight on the one which was just beginning to strug-
gle back to financial security. The Times, indeed,
managed to enliven the early period of the conflict
by a private war of its own with certain advertisers.
The North German Lloyd Steamship Company had
sold a vessel to the Spanish Government, for use as
a troopship or converted cruiser. The Times ob-
served editorially that whatever the legal aspects of
this sale of war material to the enemy, it was pretty
poor business in the North German Lloyd thus to
affront the people which was its best customer.
This observation stirred up a too zealous official of
that company not only to withdraw his own adver-
tising from The Times, but to endeavor to persuade
other steamship lines to follow his example, on the
ground that this was unwarranted and intolerable
criticism of a foreign transportation company.

This coming to the attention of The Times, its
227

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

editors were moved to the comment, several times
repeated on the editorial page, that this transaction
involved something which looked very much Hke
criminal conspiracy. The right of the North Ger-
man Lloyd to withdraw its own advertising was con-
ceded, but when it attempted to form a combination
against The Times it was taking a pretty long chance.
The German line had chosen a highly unpopular
issue, and before long friends of its managers were
coming to The Times office and begging the paper
to let up on them. The attempted combination was
abandoned. Even if the German line had been suc-
cessful, the loss of steamship advertising would have
made no very great diminution in the income of any
newspaper; but just then, in 1898, The Times needed
all it could get — and indeed a good deal more.

Nor was it able to recover any of the lost ground
on the basis of enormous increases in circulation.
Some increase there was; The Times was growing
from week to week — but growing slowly. And the
war had suddenly forced it into a situation where it
could not hope to compete against its more prosper-
ous rivals.

The Spanish-American War was probably, from
the viewpoint of a certain type of newspaper man,
the most convenient war ever fought. It was a little
war; it was a short war, and it was near at hand.
Nor had there been any great conflicts in recent
years which might have overshadowed it or enabled
the country to view it in proper perspective. And,
though the fighting was on a small scale, the issues
were indeed important — important to the whole
country. Here was a war, almost on the front door-

228

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

step, in which a people which had been at peace for
a third of a century had an overwhelming interest.
This alone made it a tremendous news story. More-
over, it did not last long enough for the enthusiasm
of the early weeks to be cooled. It was brilliantly
successful; there were no defeats to sober the coun-
try, no long casualty lists to divert attention. Its
history could be, and was, what was called a few
years later a "glory story.**

And, above all, it was a war on a small scale. It
was not so big that the doings of the armies over-
shadowed the competitive enterprise of the news-
papers. As a happy hunting ground for war corre-
spondents it has seldom been equaled. The arma-
das of dispatch boats loaded with reporters, feature
writers and photographers sent down by some of
the New York papers were about as formidable as
Sampson's fleet, and their doings took up pretty
nearly as much space in dispatches. As for the
campaigns ashore, the readers of some papers might
justifiably have been in doubt whether the war was
primarily a field for the doings of eminent person-
ages who had volunteered from civil life or a con-
venient arrangement for exploitation of the famous
correspondents who happened to write about the
eminent personages. The fact that a battle had been
fought, and that we had won it, was less important
than that Mr. A, the renowned politician, and Mr.
B, the noted Yale halfback, had taken part in the
battle; and this again was of less consequence (ac-
cording to some newspapers) than that the doings
of Mr. A and Mr. B had been reported by the fa-
mous correspondent X, and depicted by the cele-

229

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

brated artist Y. And before the public had time to
tire of this sort of thing the war was over, and every-
body but the few thousand victims of "canned
horse" and the Cuban cHmate had come home.

In all this The Times had no part, for the painful
reason that it had no money. It was laboriously
paying its way; it could manage to meet current ex-
penses, but it could not plunge into any of the wild
expenditures undertaken by the more prosperous
New York papers. As an example of what those
papers which could afford it were doing may be
mentioned The Herald's dispatch of some 2000 words
on the night of July 3, which alone of special dis-
patches to individual newspapers brought, in time
for publication next morning, the details of the de-
struction of Cervera^s fleet. It was filed at Port
Antonio, Jamaica, for transmission via Kingston
and Panama, and to take precedence of the hun-
dreds of thousands of words of press dispatches piled
up at the Port Antonio telegraph office it was sent
at double the commercial rates, prepaid, the total
cost being ^3.25 a word, paid in gold.

The Times could not do this or anything like it.
Even dispatch boats and special cables were an im-
possible luxury. When the news came The Times
displayed it as intelligently and satisfactorily as
anybody, and its editorial comment on the news
was sound and well informed; but the news itself
was everybody's news — it came from The Associ-
ated Press. The Times did, indeed, have a little
mail correspondence, but that counted for nothing
in a time when the victories of Schley and Shafter
were less important in themselves than the oppor-

230

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

tunities which they afforded for shrieking headhnes,
signed cablegrams in twelve-point full face and
smudgy pictures by staff artists. The Times was
still a good newspaper, but it couldn't compete in
calling the attention of the public to its excellence.

So the end of the war found the management of
The Times facing the possibiHty that the work of
the past two years had been in vain. The meagre
hundred thousand dollars of operating capital with
which Mr. Ochs had started was gone, and the re-
ceipts of the paper, though gradually improving, were
not sufficient to make it up. It was apparent that
something had to be done, but when the pubUsher put
forward his idea of the proper remedy many people
thought that it meant sudden and irretrievable ruin.
He proposed to cut the price to one cent. It had
been forty-seven years since The Times had sold at
that price, and the one-cent field among morning
newspaper readers had long been left to The World
and The Journal, It had come to be the general
opinion that that was the sort of thing people wanted
for one cent; that those who thought that no news-
paper was worth more than that would be quite
content with what was offered them and had no ap-
petite for anything else.

The publisher thought otherwise. It was his be-
lief that a great many people who found the differ-
ence between three dollars and ten dollars for a year's
newspaper bills sufficient to be worth considering
were reading The World and The Journal only be-
cause they were cheap. Give them a choice and a
good many of them might prefer a paper of the char-
acter which The Times had established. It was not

231

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

to be doubted that there were a good many objec-
tions to the proposal. There would be an immediate
and considerable decrease in circulation revenue,
though at the low price of paper in those days it
would still be possible for The Times to get more
than enough income from a one-cent circulation to
pay for the paper on which the news was printed.
The question, of course, was whether the circulation
would increase sufficiently to bring in advertising.
There was a danger that advertisers who had been
used to regarding The Times as appealing to a con-
stituency small in quantity but high in quality
would come to the conclusion that it had merely
lowered the quality without corresponding increase
in quantity. What The Times hoped to do was to
increase the quantity while retaining the same qual-
ity.

In other words, it did not expect to cut in on the
natural field of The World and The Journal. It was
not going to be a "yellow" journal; it was not going to
compete for the favor of those who wanted "yellow"
journals. Mr. Ochs said in an interview published
in a trade paper a few months later (January, 1899):

Such papers as The World and The Journal
exist because the public wants them. I
hold that some of their features are open to
criticism, but each of them has done infi-
nitely more good than harm.

It was quite clear to the publisher of The Times
that there was a large part of the one-cent public
which wanted precisely what it was getting for one
cent. The question which could be decided only by
trial was whether there might be also a part of the

232

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

one-cent public that wanted something of a differ-
ent sort. And The Times resolved to find out.

In the editorial announcement of the change of
price on October lo, 1898, some of the aspects of the
matter as they appeared to The Times management
were stated as follows:

It is the price of the paper, not its char-
acter, that is changed. In appealing to a
larger audience The Times by no means pro-
poses to offend the taste or forfeit the confi-
dence of the audience it now has, already
large, discriminating, and precious to it as
lifelong friends. That statement we make
in full sincerity and with firm resolution.
We wish to make it with all possible empha-
sis, so that no reader of The Times in the
past need scan the columns of this morning's
issue, or of any subsequent issue, with the
least misgiving or apprehension lest the re-
duction in price may be concurrent with a
lowering in tone and quality. The old
readers of The Times and the new shall find
it a clean, truthful, carefully edited news-
paper at one cent, a paper that recognizes
its obligation to give its readers all the
news, but values its own good name and
their respect too highly to put before them
the untrue or the unclean, or to affront
their intelligence and their good taste with
freaks of typographic display or reckless
sensationalism. . . .

During the past two years The Times
has made a large advance in circulation.
. . . No paper, however, ever increases
in circulation fast enough to satisfy its con-
ductors. It has seemed to the management
of The Times that while the growth of its
233

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

sales was steady and substantial, it was too
slow; that, while its circulation has reached
a large figure for a newspaper of its charac-
ter, it ought to be larger. . . .

The proposition that many thousands of
persons in this city of three and one-half
million souls buy and read one-cent news-
papers chiefly on account of their price and
not on account of their character and qual-
ity seemed sound. We believe these thou-
sands would like to read a newspaper of the
character and quality of The Times in pref-
erence to, or let us generously suppose in
conjunction with, the papers they have been
reading. The Times has determined to ex-
tend its appeal beyond those readers with
whom quality is indispensable and price a
matter of no consequence to the presumably
much larger number of persons to whom
both price and quality are of consequence.

This emphasis on the unaltered character and
quality of the paper now offered at one third of the
former price was terribly necessary. Many readers
would be certain to feel that only a "yellow" paper
could be produced for one cent and would look with
cynical eagerness for the expected deterioration in
quality. Indeed, this view seems to have been held
by some people in The Times office. On the night
the change was announced one of the reporters
came in with what he joyfully heralded to the night
city editor as "a beautifully sensational story." It
did not appear in the paper; indeed, the publisher
afterward observed that he wouldn't have had a
"sensational" story in that day's issue for any con-
sideration. And, little by little, doubting readers

234

i 11 t£

THE PRESENT HOME,

THE TIMES ANNEX,

WEST 43RD ST.— TIMES SQUARE.

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

of The Times became convinced that their fears were
needless. It was the same paper they had been
getting; nothing had been changed but the price.
Some unfriendly comment, however, was occa-
sioned by the change, and for other reasons. It
must have been known to anybody in the news-
paper business in New York that the editorial ob-
servation of October lo that **it has seemed to the
management of The Times that while the growth of
its sales was steady and substantial, it was too slow,"
was certainly not an overstatement. Newspaper
men pretty generally suspected what was indeed
the fact, that The Times had virtually been driven
to the step; and there were some who ungenerously
attributed it to base reasons. A gubernatorial cam-
paign was going on at the time, and the newspaper
was supporting Augustus Van Wyck, the Demo-
cratic candidate. The suspicion not unnaturally
sprang up in many minds that this reduction of in-
come was only possible because there was some
compensating revenue which had suddenly been
opened to the paper. Only one newspaper. The
Evening Mail, came boldly out and said that The
Times had been subsidized by Tammany; and when
The Times promptly called that paper to account, it
as promptly apologized. But the suspicion per-
sisted among some readers, and one of them, who
was frank enough to express his opinions in a letter
to the editor, was answered by an editorial state-
ment which pointed out that it would be rather
transparently stupid to take this step in the middle
of a political campaign if its reason were that which
the political position of the paper might suggest.

235

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Stronger than the conviction that The Times had
sold out to Tammany was the belief of most
practical newspaper men that this meant the be-
ginning of the end. The changes of price in the
eighties, which had such unhappy results, were re-
called, and it seemed to be the general conviction
that The Times would find it impossible to retain
its quality at one cent. The Tribune and The Her-
ald, whose comments on the change were in a
friendly tone which bore evidence of the more civ-
ilized spirit which was coming into New York jour-
nalism, nevertheless expressed their conviction that
high quality could not long be given at low price.
One may surmise that their conviction was perhaps
strengthened by the fear that if it were possible,
their own readers might wonder why they couldn't
do it; and though the suspicion is perhaps ungen-
erous, one cannot help feeling that the friendly tone
of their references to the subject was perhaps due
to the conviction that this meant the speedy disap-
pearance of an old rival.

More gratifying to The Times, among the numer-
ous remarks on the change in other papers, were
those of The Philadelphia Record, which expressed a
belief based on its own experience that The Times
would find, as The Record had found, that it was
possible to be both decent and cheap. Since The
Record, selling at one cent, was at that time one of
the most profitable newspaper properties in the
country, this encouragement was welcome as a hope-
ful token of what might be ahead of The Times,

And The Record's prediction was right. At first
the reduction applied only to sales in the city; out-

236

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

of-town customers still paid three cents, as they
had paid before. But with the announcement came
an immediate demand from these subscribers for a
reduction of The Times to two cents out of town,
which was the price charged in those parts for The
World and The Journal. It had been the intention
to make this change eventually; it had been delayed
because the presses were barely able to take care of
the increased city circulation anticipated from the
reduction. But the protests of out-of-town sub-
scribers made it apparent almost at once that there
was opportunity to make great gains in that field
also. The change was made one week after the
original announcement, with the assistance of other
papers who lent The Times the use of part of their
mechanical plant until its own could be appropri-
ately expanded. It might be remarked for the bene-
fit of the nonprofessional reader that newspapers
have always, even in the days of their most bitter
vituperation of each other, been ready for such re-
ciprocal assistance in case of any really serious need
— a fact which might have suggested to their read-
ers long before the smoke began to blow away that
a good deal of the harsh language was emitted
merely for the joy of battle.

The Times^s circulation began to jump. It no
longer climbed slowly and laboriously; it vaulted
from pinnacle to pinnacle. Less than a month
showed that the reduction of price had done all that
had been hoped, and it continued to do more in the
following months. The most skeptical eventually
had to admit that the quality of The Times was as
good as ever — indeed, better than ever, for the re-

237

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

newed prosperity of the paper made it possible to
spend more money for news. And the gain in cir-
culation was astounding. In September, 1898, the
daily average circulation was 25,726. In Septem-
ber, 1899, one year later, it was 76,260. There are
few if any parallels to this sudden rise in American
newspaper history.

The gain in advertising was commensurate. In
1898 the advertisements printed amounted to 2,433,-
193 agate lines. In 1899 they had risen to 3,378,750.
And the increase had not been accompanied by any
loss in character. Some of the advertisers supposed
that the drive at a one-cent circulation meant re-
duction of rates, since the increase in circulation
might be offset by the lower buying power of the new
readers. It did not seem so to the management of
The Times; in a single month, shortly after the
change, more than ^50,000 worth of advertising was
refused because it was offered below the regular
rates of the paper. The Times was preparing to
build up a high-class constituency at a low price.
It succeeded amazingly, and long before it had
achieved the full measure of its intent the late An-
drew Carnegie, as shrewd a judge of values as ever
came from Scotland, pronounced it '*the best cent's
worth in the world."

It may be admitted that when the change was
made it was not supposed by the management of
The Times that the one-cent price would be long
retained. Newspapermen in the latter part of 1898
knew that The World and The Journal^ by their
enormously expensive competition, which came to a
climax in the covering of the Spanish War, had

238

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

eaten heavily into their profits. The fight was
beginning to cost more than it was worth, and it was
generally understood that the papers were preparing,
by agreement, to raise their price to two cents.
When that time came, The Times was going to two
cents with them; but the management believed that
it would be more profitable to come up to two cents
than down to it — that most of the readers who
had learned to like The Times at one cent would stay
with it when the price was increased, especially as
there would be no one-cent morning papers left.
But The World and The Journal, faced with this
sudden and amazingly vigorous competition in their
own field, did not dare to try it; they were quite
possibly afraid that if they went to two cents The
Times would stay at one cent and attract many of
their readers. As suggested above, the publisher of
The Times was not of this opinion; but since his
competitors stuck to the old price he did the same,
and there was no change until the unprecedented
expenses of the World War, nearly twenty years
afterward, forced all the morning papers to go back
to two cents.

From the morning of October lo, 1898, the pros-
perity of The Times was assured. It had turned
the corner and the old penniless days were soon to
become only a memory. It was thereafter only a
question of the degree of the paper's success, and it
presently increased beyond the dream of any one
in the office. Of the fact of success there was never,
from the end of 1898, any doubt.

Though the rate of progress was slower for a few
years after that, the progress was without inter-

239

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

mission. So well was The Times getting ahead that
the paper was able in 1900 to undertake at an expense
of ^50,000 the publication of a special edition at the
Paris Exposition. This younger sister of The New
York Times, to which it bore a very strong family
likeness, was published within the Exposition
grounds in June, July, August, September and
October under the editorship of George W. Ochs, a
brother of the publisher. It showed the French
a good deal about American newspaper methods and
aroused their respect, even if it did not excite their
emulation, and it furnished American visitors to the
Exposition with a plentiful supply of home news and
world news such as they were quite unable to get
from the old established competing publication
which devoted most of its space to the doings of the
European aristocracy and the mathematical per-
plexities of the Old Lady from Philadelphia. It was
a good newspaper, and it was an excellent advertise-
ment for The New York Times.

By this time, however. The Times was getting
to the stage where it hardly needed any longer to
advertise itself. Its reputation was attending to
the advertising. The general belief among the
newspaper men of 1896 that The Times could
not be revived had been so strong that some of
the paper's competitors did not realize that it was
catching up with them until it was some distance
ahead.

The old United Press, which had been maintained
at heavy expense by The Sun, The Herald, The
Tribune and The Times, and whose drain on The
Times's resources had done a good deal to bring

240

RESTORATION OF THE TIMES, 1896-1900

the paper into its financial misfortunes, went to
pieces soon after the new management assumed con-
trol of The Times. The Times, The Herald and The
Tribune at once applied for admission to The Associ-
ated Press, then incorporated under the laws of
Illinois, and The Herald and The Tribune were
admitted with full rights and privileges, but The
Times was able to get in only as a sort of stepchild,
on what was known as a Class B membership, with
no right of protest. Fortunately for the paper, the
Supreme Court of lUinois decided in 1900 that
The Associated Press was a public utility and com-
pelled to furnish its news to anybody. This forced
a reorganization under the laws of New York. Mr.
Ochs, through his Chattanooga Times membership,
was one of the leading members of The Associated
Press and had been active in the work of the organ-
ization. Now that there was to be a reorganization
in New York, The Times received full membership,
and he was welcomed to the councils of the leaders
and became one of the charter members of the new
body. And for twenty years past he has been a
member of the Board of Directors and of its Execu-
tive Committee.

By that time the prosperity of The Times was
securely established, and the reorganization com-
mittee was dissolved on July i, 1900. The 3876
shares which had been held until the publisher
should have made the paper pay its way for three
consecutive years were transferred to him. The
experiment, regarded as hopeless by all the experts,
had succeeded in less than four years, and it was
already evident that bigger things were ahead. In

241

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

this recovery many men played their parts, but the
contribution of the new pubHsher may be suggested
by the remark made, years later, by one of the
veterans of The Times staff: ''He found the paper
on the rocks, and made them foundation stones."

242

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CHAPTER II

Conservatism, Independence, Democracy:
1900-1914

/^N September i8, 1901, The Times celebrated
^^ its golden jubilee, which was commemorated on
September 25 in a special historical supplement
whose publication was deferred for a week on account
of the funeral of President McKinley. The ad-
vertisements published in that supplement, 224 in
number, were all representative of firms which had
been doing business in New York City on September
18, 1 85 1, and ever since, a convincing demonstration
that even in this city of rapid and enormous changes
there was still a commercial substratum of old tradi-
tions with prospects of something like permanence.
In the editorial comment on the anniversary there
was of course some discussion of the changes in the
character of journalism between 1851 and 1901, the
chief of which was the extensive publication by
papers at the beginning of the twentieth century of
what may be called ** personal news," the chronicle
of happenings in the lives of individuals themselves
of no great importance. The reading public had
become interested not only in the big news, in public
affairs and events of great importance, but in the
reporting of things on which the reader could make
the comment, '*That might have happened to me."
It might have been supposed in 1901 that the
243

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

development of the art of news-getting in future
decades would be chiefly in this same direction. But
the editors of The Times suspected even then that
this was not wholly true, for in their editorial re-
marks on the future of the paper they gave their
principal attention to the ** alliance for mutual
benefit" which had just been concluded with The
London Times — an arrangement of which more
will presently be said — by which The New York
Times obtained all rights to the world news service
of its English contemporary. Said a Times editorial
article on the jubilee day:

The occasional triumph known in the lingo
of journalism as a '*beat" may shed a fleet-
ing lustre on the name of a newspaper.
Of those The Times has had its share in
the half century of its life. But the daily
habit of gathering into its columns from
the four corners of the earth all the news
which vigilance and faithful eff*ort can
obtain and in which intelligent minds are
likely to be interested gives enduring char-
acter and reputation and determines the
public judgment.

And indeed the remarkable growth of The Times
in the following years was largely due to its diligence
in obtaining, and sound judgment in handling, the
big news, much of it foreign news. This had been
notably true even before the outbreak of the war
of 1914-1918 gave to American journalism a test
from which The Times emerged perhaps more bril-
liantly than any of its competitors. Even so early
as 1901 it was apparent that the American people
were in the world, whether they liked it or not;

244

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

that the long introversion of the decades after the
Civil War had at last come to an end. The world
was visibly drawing into a closer interrelation, and
the years between 1901 and 1914 were to see the
development of a peaceful internationalism, an
assimilation of all nations, or at least of the upper
and middle classes of all nations, to a common
standard of life, such as had not been known since
the Roman Empire broke down.

It was to be the destiny of The Times to find its
most brilliant opportunities in responding to the
demands of this new age for news from far wider
fields than those in which the majority had had any
interest in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The isolation of the seventies and eighties, an isolation
always more apparent than real, had ended when
Dewey's guns boomed in Manila Bay. *' Personal
news'' had reached its utmost popularity in the
nineties; with a new era of international peace it
may once more come back, as it has begun to come
back since the war, to overshadowing importance;
but the editors of The Times in 1901 judged rightly
the tendencies of the age which was beginning. For
a third of a century the American people, like some
orders of mediaeval monks, had been trying to
find peace by gazing at its own navel, and it was
just awakening to the discovery that the world
contained sights of somewhat more absorbing
interest.

The Times set forth upon this new era in the
enjoyment of a higher degree of material prosperity
than it had ever known in its best days of old. Its
paid circulation in its jubilee month averaged

245

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

102,472 per day — a stupendous figure by the
standards of Raymond and Jones, but one which the
conductors of the paper could already see was only
a beginning. Even they hardly realized in 1901
that the circulation of The Times would reach the
figures of today, which are seldom much below, and
often above, those of its most aggressively ** popu-
lar" contemporaries in New York morning journal-
ism. That some New York papers have a circula-
tion of 300,000 or 400,000 a day is not surprising;
the only surprising circumstance is that they do
not sell a million a day, for there is nothing in them
which anybody cannot understand. That a paper
such as The Times, which, though not aiming ex-
pressly at a limited number of intelligent readers,
does give up its pages rather to the news of general
interest and high importance than to items which
tickle the fancy, should have a circulation of 350,000
is somewhat more remarkable, and those who produce
The Times may be pardoned if they regard it as
rather encouraging for the future of a democracy
which is likely to get into a good deal of trouble
unless it knows what is going on.

The Times in 1901 was firmly on its feet; it had
won back its old position and somewhat more.
The history of that recovery has been told; the
chronicle of the years that were to come before the
outbreak of the World War is a somewhat different
story, the story of the paper's emergence from the
crowd, so to speak, to a position which may at least
be described as that of a primus inter pares in the
prompt and reliable presentation of the news of the
world. Some of the war cries of the earlier years

246

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

were to be heard less frequently in the future. The
crusade against "yellow" journaHsm, for example,
gradually died away. There was no longer so much
need for a crusade, for the bright orange journalism
of the nineties was, in some quarters at least, slowly
fading into a somewhat more respectable color.

The Times had of course contributed a good deal
to the war against "3^ellow" journalism, but its war
aims were of a somewhat different sort from those
of its associates. To use a terminology familiar
to present-day readers, it was not fighting a war of
conquest or annihilation. It might aspire to some
disannexations of those portions of the reading
public which had been attracted into the sphere of
influence of the ''yellow" journals, though they right-
fully belonged to The TimeSy but that had been
accomphshed by the reduction of price in 1898. Its
conductors never had the desire which was apparently
cherished by some of their contemporaries to blot
out certain others.

The object, and the only object, of The Times^s
criticism of "yellow" journaHsm was to famiharize
every newspaper reader with the fact that The Times
would give him what its conductors regarded as the
good elements that were to be found in their more
sensational contemporaries, and would give them
at the same low price, without the other features
which many readers found objectionable. It was
their purpose to see that nobody should read the
"yellows'* under the misapprehension that there and
there alone could he get the news, and get it for
one cent. When this fact had been advertised,
when everybody knew what The Times offered, then

247

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

it was the reader's business to decide what kind of
paper he wanted. After that The Times was con-
tent with the steady growth-that came year by year
as more and more readers came to find The Times
more satisfactory than the papers which had pre-
viously been their favorites.

The history of this intervening period between
1900 and 1914 can perhaps best be told in compart-
ments; by taking up first the editorial views of The
Times and their reactions on the public, then the
development of the news side of the paper, and
finally some episodes in its business history which
are pertinent to the story of the paper's rise to
power, and interesting also as having some bearing
on the rising ethical standards of the newspaper
business.

The Times' s position as an independent Democratic
newspaper was maintained in the early years of the
twentieth century, with the qualification that it was
somewhat more independent than Democratic. For
Mr. William Jennings Bryan The Times has never
had much admiration, except in so far as it wel-
comed him as imparting to politics something of
that character, at once hilarious and consecrated,
which the Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday gives to religion.
The Times supported the Republican Presidential
ticket in 1900 because at last the Republican Party
had been driven into genuine support of the sound
money issue, and because the Republicans, though
by no means united in their opinion on the future
duties and responsibilities of the United States as a
world power, were free from that academic sort of

248

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

anti-imperialism which pleased Mr. Bryan. Mr.
McKinley, though by no means a giant among
statesmen, was learning more about the business
of being President, and his latest utterances indi-
cated that he understood some of the demands of
the day a little better than the gentleman who so
soon was to succeed him.

For Mr. Roosevelt's character, energy and patriot-
ism The Times always had the highest respect, and
its editors would not deny that on the whole he
was an immensely valuable asset to the America of
his time. But the President of the United States
has to be not only the worshiper and preacher of
ideals but an official performing certain functions.
For many of Mr. Roosevelt's actions The Times
had only praise, but its editors were inclined to
think that the effect of much of his radical teachings
went a good deal further than he himself would
have liked to believe, and they could not fail to note
that one of the great problems of the time, tariff
reform, was an issue when he came into office and
an issue that had got no further forward when he
went out.

The Democratic Party in 1904 had repudiated
most of the heresies which Mr. Bryan had raised
to the level of dogmas, and seemed to be turning
back toward the sounder positions of Cleveland's
day. The Times accordingly supported Alton
B. Parker. As in 18^72 and 1880, the people were
once more inclined to trust the Republican Party,
and unhappily the Democratic leaders seemed to
think after the defeat of 1904 that the only way to
overcome Roosevelt's popularity was by adopting

249

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

his doctrines. When Mr. Bryan was once more the
Democratic candidate in 1908, The Times supported
Taft, but the betrayal of pledges by the Republican
Party which followed immediately drove away from
it all its independent supporters, as well as a con-
siderable fraction of the party membership. In
the agitation which beset the Democratic Party
during the years when every aspiring politician
had his eye on a nomination that carried more
prospect of election than those of previous cam-
paigns, The Times was chiefly interested in keeping
the party from running ofF the track. In the pre-
convention campaign of 191 2 it had no favored candi-
date, but when it became apparent that the nominee
must be either Woodrow Wilson or Champ Clark
The Times declared its opinion that Mr. Wilson was
as well equipped for the Presidency as any man the
party could nominate, and considerably better
equipped than any one else whose nomination could
be regarded as a possibility. After the convention
Mr. Wilson believed, and said in a telegram to the
publisher of The Times that that editorial had greatly
contributed to his nomination. His record as
Governor of New Jersey, his speeches during the
preconvention campaign, and the character of much
of his support had marked him as a radical candidate.
Some of the leaders In the Baltimore convention
believed, or allowed themselves to be convinced
by enemies of Mr. Wilson, that the conservative
elements in the party would not support him if he
was nominated. These fears were blown away by
this editorial in The Times. If the leading conserva-
tive paper in the party, a paper which had shown its

250

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

independence by supporting the Republican candi-
date in two elections out of the last three, was satis-
fied with Mr. Wilson, there could be no fear of any
serious bolt.

The Times was not wholly in sympathy at that
time with Mr. Wilson's ideas of government, but its
conductors realized that the choice lay between
him and Champ Clark. Speaker Clark's conserva-
tism, in the opinion of The Times, consisted rather in
a certain antiquity of manner, and a resolute in-
difference to things that had happened in recent
decades, than in any real understanding of conserva-
tive ideas; and Mr. Wilson's intellectual equipment
was so far superior that The Times thought it wiser to
trust a man competent to fill the Presidential office,
who might be expected to learn as he went along.

The subsequent history of The Times^s editorial
support of President Wilson is sufficiently well
known. No newspaper ever gave an administration
more loyal support; no favors were received In re-
turn and none would have been accepted. The
Times has never been willing to pose as an amplifying
transmitter for whispers from the lips of authority.
To become recognized as the mouthpiece for any
administration would have meant the surrender in
some measure of the paper's independence, or at
any rate of its reputation for independence; It would
have required a somewhat different attitude on the
part of its conductors, a complaisance toward ten-
dencies in the administration with which they were
dissatisfied, a willingness to shut their eyes to some
things that existed, and to pretend to see things
that were mere figments of the imagination.

251

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

But it may be said by critics of the Wilson
administration that on the major issues of these
eight years the paper supported the President. It
did so in many cases because it happened to agree
with the President. The Underwood-Simmons tariff
The Times regarded as the most satisfactory that
had been enacted in many years, and for Mr. Wil-
son's services to the country in obtaining the passage
of the Federal Reserve act it felt that no praise
could be too high. There was much room for
criticism and dissatisfaction in Mr. Wilson's first
year, but, as a rule, on minor points. Mr. Bryan's
disruption of the diplomatic service, for example,
was deplorable in itself, but it was part of the price
of the Federal Reserve act. Had Mr. Bryan been
left outside the administration that enactment
might have been impossible over his opposition.

In the principal crises of the later years of Mr.
Wilson's administrations The Times supported the
President because the choice was not between Mr.
Wilson and ideal perfection, but between Mr. Wilson
and concrete alternatives which seemed less desirable.
In the opinion of its conductors he was a President
who rose to most of the unusually heavy responsi-
bilities laid upon him, and on the dominant issues of
his day took a position against which nothing could
be said except that he was perhaps a few years ahead
of the average voter. And in its editorial summary
of his eight years in office, on February 27, 1921,
The Times took the position that Mr. Wilson had
been a great President, whose true importance and
usefulness would be increasingly apparent as time
went on. As was said in that article:

252

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

It made a world of difference whether
throughout the war and at the end of the
war we had in the White House a common
man, or a man above the common. A Presi-
dent content to patch up the shattered
world and set it spinning again in the old
grooves would have been overlooked alto-
gether. He never would have helped the
nation to find its soul, he would not have
found his own. ... As if by predestination,
when the war came, one was at the post of
duty and of trial who, by his gifts and
abilities, seemed to be designated above all
others for a service such as no American
had ever before been summoned to under-
take.

Yet, because the paper was not always able to
agree with the administration, it incurred the usual
inconveniences of those who see some right on both
sides. To most Republicans it was a rabid Demo-
cratic paper, to be abhorred for its partisanship;
and by thick-and-thin, for-better-for-worse adherents
of Mr. Wilson, it was accused of damning the ad-
ministration with faint praise.

Most of the matters, however, on which The Times
criticised those in office between 191 3 and 1921 were
questions outside the President's own field of activity.
The election of 191 2 had brought not only Woodrow
Wilson but the Democratic Party into power, and
on many issues the President was wiser than his
party. The criticism has been made that The Times
was a consistent supporter of Wilson, yet was
opposed to almost everything that Wilson did.
That is a mistake. The Times was a consistent
supporter of Wilson, though disagreeing with his

253

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

attitude on some of the less important issues of his
administration; its opposition was for the most
part directed against the eccentricities of the Demo-
cratic majority in Congress, which the President
was often compelled, for political considerations, to
ignore, or to meet with an acquiescence which must
at times have come hard.

It may be asked, then, why The Times in recent
years has consistently supported the Democratic
Party. The answer is, first, that the publisher of
The Times is a Democrat not by geography —
though Mr. Ochs spent his early life in Tennessee,
his father had been a Captain in the Union
Army — but by conviction, and so is its editor-in-
chief, Mr. Miller, who comes from New Hampshire.
But that answer, after all, does not explain much,
for there are no longer very many Democrats left
in the Democratic Party. That party once meant
something; it meant that one of the great political
organizations of the country believed that the
people in a democracy could better be trusted, in
the long run, than any group whatever of benevolent
oligarchs, and that the federal organization of the
United States was more than a mere historical acci-
dent — that it met the needs of a numerous people
occupying a country of enormous extent, with wide
differences in natural conditions and in the public
sentiment of far distant localities. In that sense
the conductors of The Times are among the few
Democrats surviving. And it might be added that
this fundamental concept of the Democratic Party's
philosophy explains the fact that the two chief
Democratic papers of the country. The Times and

2S4

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

The World, can both be Democratic while disagreeing
on most details. The World is liberal and The Times
conservative, but they are agreed in the opinion
that the union of these states is and of a right ought
to be a Federal union, as well as in the view that
political wisdom and capacity for government, even
if not bestowed very liberally on the people at large,
are not to be found more highly concentrated in any
particular economic, religious or geographic sub-
division of the people.

These doctrines were once the distinguishing
mark of a Democrat. They are now conspicuous
chiefly by their rarity; about the only distinction
between a Democrat and a Republican today is that
the Democrat is generally out of office. The cen-
tralizing movement of recent years, which has pretty
well blotted out state lines and tended to turn over
the control of Government more and more to bureau-
crats, has been promoted quite as much by Demo-
crats as by Republicans. The Republicans, to be
sure, have been inclined to favor oligarchies whose
claim to superiority was their possession, real or
pretended, of executive ability; while the Demo-
crats have generally bowed down before oHgarchies
of pretended superiority of moral virtue. But
whether the favored few are protected manufacture
ers or officials of the Anti-Saloon League, the effect
is the same.

What is the duty of a Democrat in such a time?
It might be held that his motto should be, "My
party, right or wrong; if right, to keep it right; if
wrong, to make it right." The Times has not been
able to go quite so far as this; sometimes the Demo-

255

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

cratic Party has been so wrong that the only way
to make it right was by supporting the RepubHcan
ticket. But, generally speaking, the conductors of
the paper have believed that the Democratic Party
needed all the intelligent support it could get and
all that could conscientiously be given by those who
hold to the old Democratic doctrines. So long as
old-fashioned JefFersonian Democrats and conserva-
tive Democrats found it possible to stick to the
party they could act as a brake on the exuberant
and misdirected energies of those Democrats whose
chief representative in recent history has been Mr.
Bryan. By clinging to the party and doing their
best to remind it that it is, or ought to be, some-
thing more than a mere aggregation of jobless poli-
ticians, these Democrats could perhaps do a real
service to the country in holding the party to certain
standards, and thus making it a really effective
check on the Republicans.

For the genius of the Democratic Party shines
best in adversity. Out of office the party often dis-
plays public spirit and sometimes real statesmanship.
Once in control of the Government, the Democrats
are likely — in the opinion of the management of
The Times — to forget their own principles and be-
come mere imitators of the Republicans. Opinions
may differ as to whether it is admirable to be a Re-
publican, but certainly it is better to be a real Re-
publican than a poor carbon copy. Republicanism
can best be practiced by men who are Republicans
year after year, in office or out, and not by diluted
imitations who no sooner find themselves in control
of the Government than they begin to wonder,

256

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

rather frantically, how the Republicans would do it,
and then try their best to do the same.

Ninety years ago the Democratic Party, or that
controlling faction of it led by Andrew Jackson,
really meant something in national affairs. When it
came back after the misfortunes under Van Buren
and the Whig interlude that followed, it had bound
itself to the service of a sectional oligarchy, and it
remained in bondage till the Civil War. Since then
the party has always been, in effect, the opposition.
Even the great vote that ought to have carried
Samuel J. Tilden to the White House was largely a
protest vote. By undeserved good luck the Demo-
cratic Party had as its leader in the '80s and '90s
one of the strongest and wisest statesmen of Ameri-
can history. What did it do with him? It nomi-
nated him, to be sure, and renominated him twice,
but that was because Grover Cleveland had shown
that he could be elected, and no other Democrat
since the war had been able to do that. When he
was once in office some of his own followers were
the first to stick their knives in his back.

But whether or not the country would be best
served by a condition in which the Republicans, per-
petually in power, would be prodded into virtue and
efficiency by a Democracy perpetually in opposition,
such a condition is impossible. Ambitious young men
join the party which has the offices at its disposal. A
few Democrats have to be elected now and then to en-
courage the others. This may perhaps explain why
The Times, though Democratic, is apt to be more crit-
ical of the Democrats in office than of their opponents.
Nothing surprising or out of the ordinary is to be ex-

257

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

pected from the Republican Party — except under such
unusual leaders as Roosevelt, and, after all, Roosevelt
kept the country expecting great and wonderful things
for seven and a half years, few of which happened.
In ordinary times everybody knows what the Re-
publican Party is; good or bad, it is a fixed quan-
tity. There is more exhilaration in supporting and
criticising the Democrats, whose worst can be in-
credibly bad, whose best is sometimes surprisingly
good, and who are just as likely to display the one
as the other. At any rate, there is always the pos-
sibiHty that with the proper support, and the proper
amount of well-timed castigation, the Democrats
may be driven to do something which ordinarily
would be entirely beyond their vision — the Federal
Reserve act, for instance. It is the difference be-
tween marrying a domestic disposition and an artis-
tic temperament.

So it will be observed that The Times is Demo-
cratic both because its principal personages believe
in the traditional Democratic doctrines, and because
they think the public welfare is best served by giv-
ing the paper's support to the Democratic Party in
the hope that, being constantly reminded of its
basic principles, it may occasionally go back to those
doctrines. This attitude would in itself make it im-
possible for The Times ever to become the organ of
an Administration even if other and decisive con-
siderations did not prevent it. And it may be noted
that The Times has never, under the present man-
agement, had a candidate whom it pushed vigor-
ously for the nomination. Its support of Wilson
during the 191 2 convention was, as explained above,

258

HONOR ROLL

if HAROLD J. BEHL

if WILLIAM BRADLEY

if JOYCE KILMER

if W. S. MANNING

* EDWARD B. PIERCE

A. R. ADDISON

JULIUS OCHS ADLER

ABRAHAM FRANK AGMAN

RICHARD ALDRICH

EDWARD ROSCOE ALLEN

ROBT. K. ALLISON

RICHARD F. AMES

CHARLES WALTER ATKINSON

EDWARD A ATKINSON

CARL E. BARTLETT

WALLACE A. BAWER

W. BERRYMAN

H. M. BJORCK

GORDON BLAIR

JOS F. BLAND

THOMAS S. BOSWORTH

FRANCIS J. BOYLAN

FREDERICK A. BOYD. JR

CHARLES W. BOYLE

FRED BRAZONG

MICHAEL BRIENZA

WILLIAM F. BROSNAN

LEE D. BROWN

H. M. BUGGELYN

E. BURQUIST

JESSE S. BUTCHER

ARTHUR G CAMPBELL

S. M. CHAMBERS

ANTHONY CITRO

ROBERT C. COCHRANE

WILLIAM D. COLGAN, JR.

WALTER H COLLINS

THOMAS COOK

GEORGE COOPER

WALTER COULTER

CHARLOTTE HOLMES CRAWFORD

BENJAMIN CULLEN
EDW. B. CUMMERFORp
JOHN WEBSTER CURLEY
LEE CURTIS
GEORGE CUSACK
CHARLES DALY
CLARENCE H. DEBAUN
LOUIS DECOLLE
PATRICK S. DELANEY
EDWIN F. DELANO
JOSEPH DIXON
EDWARD DOYLE
HUGH PENTLAND DUNN
ALBERT ELDRED
HERBERT ELLUM
EDWARD WALDO EMERSON
MORRIS FACTOR
C FARRELL
JOHN FEY
HAROLD FINCH
EARL N. FINDLEY
JOHN FINN

EDWARD J. FITZSIMMONS
GEORGE H. FLANAGAN
SIMEON T. FLANAGAN
GERALD E. FORCE
ROBERT J. FORESMAN
BENTLEY J. GEIGER
ARTHUR GORTON
CHARLES GOTTSCHALK
JEANETTE C GRANT
FRANK B. GRISWOLD
EDWARD GROSS
WM. A. GROTEFELD
L. A. GUNDERSON
GUSTAV HANSON. JR.

HONOR ROLL— Continued

H HARMAN
ROLAND H. HARPER
ALFRED HARRIS
EDWARD J. HARRIS. JR
A. E. HARTZELL
FRANKLIN A HARWOOD
HAROLD B HAVILAND
WILLIAM J. HEGARTY
ELLIOTT P. HENRY
THOS. J. HERLIHY
JOHN HIMPLER
ULRICH HOFELE
PHILIP D. HOYT
C. F. HUGHES
L. HUGHES
MICHAEL A. HUGHES
HOWARD HUMPHREY
GEORGE E. HYDE
CHAS. JENKS
CARL O. JOHNSON
W. R. JOYCE
RUDOLPH C. KARR
EDWARD J KEAN
ROBERT F. KELLEY
WM. JAY KELLEY
JOHN F. KIERAN
JOHN KIMBALL
EDWARD KLAUBER
MORTIMER J. KROLL
MAURIC LANGERMAN
WM. LANIGAN
WM. LEARY
GEORGE LEHMAN
GEORGE LEONARD
GERSON LEVY
JOSEPH LISSON
G. C. LOHSS
CLARENCE E. LOVEJOY
WILLIAM H. LUBRECHT
ALLEN LUTHER
WILLIAM F. LYNCH
WRIGHT McCORMICK
JAMES McCANN
THOMAS McCANN
NEIL MacNEIL
ANDREW E MAGNUSON
CHARLES P. MAILE
AUSTIN M. MALONE
EDWARD F. MANNIX
LOUIS J. MERRELL
JAMES D. MILLS
ROBERT C. MORTON
EDWARD MOTIZZ
MATTHEW J. MURPHY
PATRICK J. MURPHY
WILLIAM MURPHY

FRANK L. NELSON

JOHN NELSON

JAMES E. NIX

JACK NYDICK

GEORGE F, O'CONNER

JAMES W. OSBORNE. JR.

FRANCIS XAVIER PAVESICH

GEORGE PAYNE

ARTHUR H. PENNEY

JOHN PETERS

EDW. j; POLOQUIN

MICHAEL PROZAN

RAPHAEL J. REARDON

EDWARD REYNOLDS

ROBERT H. ROESEN

MARTIN L. ROMAN

GEORGE L. ROONEY

R. ROWAN

REGINALD G. RUSSOM

TRACY J. RYAN

OSCAR SALVAIL

J. J. SANFORD

J. ARNOLD SAVAGE

GEORGE H. SCHNEIDERMAN

SAMSON H. SHAHBOODAGHIAN

CHARLES J. SHARKEY

J. SHARKEY

JOHN SIMONS

A. LEONARD SMITH. JR

JAMES JOSEPH SMITH

WILLIAM SMITH

R. J. SPRAGUE

EDWARD J. STEWART

JOSEPH F. SULLIVAN

ARTHUR HAYS SULZBERGER

WILLIAM A. SWANSON

PAUL LELAND SWIG ART

JAMES M. TAYLOR

GROVER C. THEIS

FREDERIC D. THOMAS, JR.

BERNARD S. THOMSON

BERNA D TRACEY

CHARLES B. VOLCKENS

H. H. WALKER

CHARLES J. WALSH

C. C. WEAVER

H. C. WEAVER

SAMUEL WEISS

MICHAEL WEISSMAN

E. B. WELLS

JAMES A. WHITEHOUSE

S. T. WILLIAMSON

EDWARD A. WIRTH

ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

RICHARD B WRIGHT

EZRA WRIGHT

T«C RIGHT 15 *IOHt t
WE 5HAU HGHT FOR THE THINCS^ which
CAWMEO HEAHtST OUR HEARTS
TO SUCH A TASK Wt OEWCATE OUR U

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

due to specific circumstances which had not been
present in the pre-convention campaign.

In the Spring of 1920, to be sure, The Times did
suggest John W. Davis as a man worthy of the con-
sideration of the Democratic National Convention.
But it was a suggestion and no more, and inspired
chiefly by a desire to remind the delegates that all
the talent of the party was not embodied in the per-
sons of William G. McAdoo, James M. Cox and A.
Mitchell Palmer. Mr. Davis was not personally
known to the conductors of The Times; but he was,
as Baedeker says, well spoken of. He was suggested
to the party without much expectation that he
would be nominated — and indeed it would have
been rather unfortunate to waste him in a year
when no Democrat could have been elected. He
was mentioned in the hope that some Democrats
might be stirred to remember that their party
had after all more talent than its leadership often
allowed to become visible.

The more important aspects of the editorial posi-
tion of The Times in recent years are, however, those
lying outside of party affiliations or partisan doc-
trines. It will probably be generally admitted that
The Times for years past has been regarded as the
most eminent champion of so-called conservatism in
the American press. This is by no means the same
thing as saying that it is the most conservative
newspaper; it is not, by a good deal. But its wide
circulation, its consistency of doctrine, its vigorous
adherence to views which have often been unpopu-
lar, have given it a certain primacy among those

259

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

marshaled on the conservative side. This position
became more clearly defined, perhaps, during the
World War and in the discussion of subsequent is-
sues; but it was established years before that. And
its conservatism is partly, though not wholly,
responsible for the distinction which The Times
undoubtedly enjoys — and that word is used advis-
edly — of being more thoroughly hated by Com-
munists, Socialists and radicals, to say nothing of
pro-Germans and Irish extremists, than any other
newspaper in the United States.

It is not to be supposed that the editors of The
Times are so eccentric as to take pride in a measure
of intellectual isolation, or so inhuman as to derive
a fiendish pleasure from the disapproval of their fel-
lows. If they are proud of their enemies, it is be-
cause they believe that the widespread antagonism
to the editorial views of the paper is in more ways
than one directly due to its merits. The readers of
The Times represent a far wider range of political
opinion than the ordinary newspaper constituency.
A great many people who cordially despise the po-
litical and economic opinions of its editors feel that
they have to buy the paper in order to get the news.
If any one doubts this, let him observe that the
radical weeklies, for example, cite The Times news
columns as authority for most of their statements of
fact. There is no doubt a certain crafty precaution
in this; if the news report should happen to be
wrong, the radical commentator can offer the apol-
ogy that he was misled by the untrustworthy "capi-
talist" press. Nevertheless, the radical weekhes
continue to get their news from The Times. Simi-

260

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

larly, many stalwart Republicans and convinced
opponents of the League of Nations have in the past
two years started the day by hating The Times over
the breakfast grapefruit; but they find that they
have to have it in preference to papers which might
better reflect their own political opinions, and thus
start them to the office with a pleasant sense of the
tightness of the world. Forty years ago, when news-
papers were chiefly political, these men would not
have taken The Times; today, when a newspaper is
first of all a newspaper, they feel that they have to
have it to find out what is going on.

A second reason for the dislike for The Times
which is felt among radicals, at least, is that The
Times stands for something. When the Socialist
orator comes to the congenial theme of the iniquity
of the "capitalist" press, he thinks of The Times as
its most prominent representative. The Times is
frankly and pretty consistently conservative — not
so consistently, of course, as radicals seem to think;
no human institution could be so regularly of one
mind as that — but on the whole always to be found
on the Right (it being understood that for obvious
reasons of delicacy this word is used in the sense
familiar in European politics, and not necessarily
with an ethical implication). Certain newspapers,
which need not be mentioned, represent pretty
nearly the same general opinions on politics and
economics as The Times, but nobody ever wastes
much hostility on them. There are other journals
whose political views are so variable, or so negligible,
that you might as well hate the city directory.
Much of this antipathy to The Times is, then, mere

261

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

recognition of the fact that the paper has opinions
of which it is not ashamed, and which it advocates
with all the vigor that its editors are able to com-
mand. In the frequent denunciations of its policies,
which its editors read with interest, there are many
which are quite obviously not directed at The Times
as an individual newspaper, but at The Times as the
most prominent, powerful, and easily recognizable
representative of a whole school of opinion.

Furthermore, a great many critics of The Times
are persons of whose friendship the paper would be
ashamed. It is sufficient to cite in this connection
the bitter attacks made upon it during the war by
German agents or their Irish sympathizers. But
even before the war The Times had many critics
whose hostility it could not regard as anything but
a badge of merit. Not all of them, by any means,
could be included in this classification, but a suffi-
cient number to explain the fact that almost any
radical orator can move his audience to wild cheers
by a few maledictions on The Times. The paper
has never had much confidence in efforts to remove
all human evils overnight by a magic formula. It
has distrusted patented and proprietary remedies
for political and economic ills. In both minor and
major matters it has usually managed to awaken
the fiery hostility of the long-haired. It has not be-
lieved and does not believe in socialism, Fourieristic,
Marxian or Leninist; in Greenbackism, Free Silver,
or the political-economic system of the Nonparti-
san League; in putting the Government into busi-
ness; in the medical sociology of anti-vivisection or
the artistic philosophies of dadaism. And since it is

262

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

the common peculiarity of most of these gospels
that their devotees become somewhat intolerant and
think that unbelievers might as well be hurried to
the stake, those who are moved to cast doubt on
the saving virtues of the new doctrine naturally
come in for a good deal of denunciation.

Yet this conviction throughout all the various di-
visions of liberalism and radicalism that hatred for
The New York Times is one of the essentials of sal-
vation is in large measure a somewhat recent growth.
Why was not The Times so cordially disliked fifty
years ago.? It was, of course, by Democrats; but
this was an ordinary manifestation of partisan ani-
mosity and involved no real conviction on the part
of the enemies of the paper that it was Satan's right
arm. And however poor an opinion its editors may
entertain of their antagonists of today, there is no
doubt that these antagonists, or nearly all of them,
are wholly sincere. Why this difference.? It is
largely due, perhaps, to a change of emphasis in the
issues; the violence of political opinion has been
steadily dying away in the United States ever since
the end of the great political upheaval of the Civil
War. It is not all gone, but it has been growing less
every year since the impeachment of Andrew John-
son. People who hate violently today are apt to
do so for economic reasons, or for reasons which,
though partly political, racial, or temperamental in
origin, they have been taught to regard as economic.

Yet The Times's general position on economic
questions has always been pretty much the same.
In economics as in politics, it has never thought it
advisable to burn the barn in order to get rid of the

263

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

rats. No doubt those who think ill of the paper
might represent this general continuity of doctrine
on The Times^s editorial page by saying that the
paper has stood still while the country has moved
on. But neither of these statements would be true.
The paper has stood still only on certain fundamen-
tal issues, such as that two and two make four, or,
at any rate, have made four in all past human his-
tory, and that it is somewhat unlikely that by vir-
tue of some mystic gospel from Kansas, North Da-
kota or Russia, two and two can be made to add up
to six and a half. Nor is it true that the rest of the
country, or the rest of American journalism, has
moved away to the Left while The Times remained
in splendid isolation in its old position just beyond
the Right Centre.

Radicalism is nothing new in America; not even
economic radicalism. But there has been a consid-
erable change in the character, if not in the volume,
of American radicalism, due largely to the changing
racial composition of the American people. Eco-
nomic radicalism in the early days of The Times was
largely a matter of agrarian or easy-money agita-
tion. It was conducted, as a matter of course,
chiefly by native Americans; recent immigrants, less
numerous than now and mostly of a different racial
provenance, were too busy graduating from the pick
and shovel to capitalistic comfort to stop and re-
member that America was the country where no
poor man had a chance. Dilettante radicalism of
the wealthier classes had not yet appeared, or rather
had sunk out of sight after its manifestation by such
men as Jefferson in the early days of the Republic.

264

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

The radical movements in the earlier days of The
Times found most of their support among farmers;
they were native products; and their votaries usu-
ally recovered their balance after two or three good
crop years. The general characteristic of these de-
lusions was a conviction that economic evils could
be ended by the printing of unlimited paper money,
or the vahdation of unlimited token money; and this
conviction usually disappeared as men and the coun-
try grew older, and the specific grievance faded
away in periods of prosperity. Passing of hard
frontier conditions brought better times to the
prairie states; young men who had followed some
peerless leader of the day in the earnest conviction
that poverty could be cured by happy improvisa-
tion often discovered, as they grew older, that in
default of more palatable remedies poverty could be
cured by work. Radicalism in those days was apt
to be only a form of wild oats.

But the newer radicalism is different in quality.
It is not a question of removing specific grievances,
real or fancied; the whole world, to the contempo-
rary radical, is only one great grievance. And the
cure of this painful condition must be exactly thus
and so, otherwise it is no cure. This radicalism is a
matter of dogma — at least the most popular and
conspicuous of its manifestations, Marxian Social-
ism, is a matter of dogma. The world is divided
into the true believers and the infidels; and the in-
fidels shall not see salvation.

The influence of socialist intolerance even on non-
socialist radicalism has probably contributed a good
deal to the conviction of most radicals that no man

265

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

can honestly be conservative. Those who disagree
with the radicals are actuated only by the desire to
continue grinding down the faces of the poor, or to
preserve their ill-gotten gains from those who would
Hke to pass them around. And it should not be for-
gotten that these doctrines, and most of their ad-
herents, came from parts of the Continent of Europe
where the give-and-take of political activity has
been unknown till quite recent years. Granting the
numerous faults of Anglo-Saxon institutions, it re-
mains true that the races who have lived for a con-
siderable time under those institutions are able to
find other explanations for difference of political
opinion than the innate and total depravity of the
opposition.

It may be conjectured that these considerations
explain, in large measure at least, the embittered
tone of most current radicalism. All conservatives,
of course, are the targets of its wrath; The Times
happens to be a conspicuous target, standing out
above the crowd. Also, the reasons suggested above
for the paper's unpopularity among opponents of its
political views are valid in considerable measure in
the field of economic controversy. Some Socialists
prefer to get the news from their own sectarian or-
gans; but a good many of them, with praiseworthy
eagerness to find out what is happening, look for
pleasant as well as unpleasant information in the
columns of The Times. It may be held, indeed, that
only a devout Bolshevik can get full pleasure out of
reading The Times; for after he has read the news he
can turn to the editorial page and enjoy a complete
catharsis of the emotions, ending with the gratify-

266

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

ing conviction that The Times editors are a gang of
scoundrels and that his own moral purity is posi-
tively dazzling by contrast.

In the period now under discussion The Times
gradually won its way to this position of conserva-
tive leadership. It had and still has a conviction,
which the little experience available has justified,
that the Government is about as poor a business
manager as can be found.

During the trust prosecutions, which offered such
lavish and innocuous entertainment to the public
for a decade or so, The Times was inclined to regard
each case on its merits. In some few of these cases
the paper was of the opinion that misconduct had
been proved and that the offending corporation
should suffer the penalty, such as it was, of dissolu-
tion; but it was unable to admit that size alone was
a crime, or that the power to do evil was to be re-
garded as no less criminal than the actual doing of
evil; and the view on this point has since been ac-
cepted by the courts. It seems probable that on
both of these issues the position taken by The Times
is much more generally accepted today than a few
years ago. For several years The Times labored to
show that bench and bar had fallen under the spell
of an ancient legal phrase, " restraint of trade." The
courts have now come to the view that the restraint
must be actual, not potential.

The direct primary, the initiative and referendum,
the recall of Judges and other officials, and similar
mechanical devices by which, it was widely believed
ten years ago, the purity of political life could be
automatically safeguarded, also found The Times

267

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

somewhat incredulous as to their merits. This in-
creduHty, it may be observed, was based principally
on a study of politics not only in the present but in
the past, and on the conviction that political im-
provement must usually be effected by raising the
standard of civic consciousness in the electorate. It
is one of the misfortunes of most radicals that they
think, or appear to think, that the beginning of the
world was contemporaneous with the beginning of
their consciousness of the world. Very often that is
why they are radicals; it is unknown to them that
their panaceas have already been tried on the pa-
tient without producing much improvement. Con-
servatism, in its literal meaning, implies an inclina-
tion to preserve the good that has come down from
the past, and a reluctance to discard institutions
that have worked at least well enough to survive
until there is strong reason to believe that substi-
tutes would be more satisfactory. But American
conservatism, thanks to the character of most of the
opposition, has rarely been forced back to this de-
fensive line. Most of its campaigns have been in
the nature of outpost fighting; its principal work
has been to remind the public of the existence of the
past when so many thinkers of contemporary pub-
lic life appear to believe that history begins with
the Communist Manifesto.

The Times's attitude toward socialism, syndical-
ism, and similar movements is sufficiently well known
to need no particular mention here. On other is-
sues, however, it should be remarked for the sake
of the record that the conservatism of the paper has
not been so unvarying as some of its critics seem to

268

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

think. At the time of the State Constitutional
Convention of 191 5, for example, The Times thought
there was need of a far more extensive revision of
the fundamental law than the convention even at-
tempted. The document finally produced, though it
seemed to The Times a rather inadequate response
to the opportunity, nevertheless received the paper's
support on the ground that it was a considerable
improvement over the Constitution of 1894, ^^^
made some much needed changes in the direction of
simplification and economy, and making the gov-
ernment of the State more easily controlled by the
voters. On this occasion the mass of the electorate
was considerably more conservative than The Times,
preferring the old Constitution with all its imper-
fections to a new one against which no serious ar-
gument was ever attempted except that it had been
made by a body in which EHhu Root was one of the
leaders.

In the matter of prohibition the paper has ex-
pressed a good deal of dissatisfaction with the theory
of Constitutional prohibition as well as with the
practice of the Volstead act. The basis of this is
not so much a behef that in questions such as this
action by the several states is more likely to re-
sult in an approximation of the popular will, though
some of the editors of The Times do believe that.
Whatever the merits of our Federal system, it is
dying; every day the states are losing more of such
power as is left them to a centralizing Federal Gov-
ernment, and not very many people seem to care.
The doubts of The Times about the wisdom of pro-
hibition arise rather from a skepticism as to the

269

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

readiness of the people for any such drastic meas-
ures, and a beHef that it is poor poHcy to make such
a sweeping change practically irrevocable by its
embodiment in the Constitution.

The judgment of history is at best a somewhat un-
certain criterion, even after some centuries have af-
forded opportunity for inspection of the results of
political action and reaction. To appeal to the
judgment of history, after a decade, is a little too
hazardous. The archaeologist from the Island of
Yap, excavating the pyramidal ruins of Manhattan
in the year 4921, may perhaps understand just where
the United States was headed in the beginning of
the twentieth century; he will certainly know whether
or not it got there. Contemporary observers can
only guess. Still, taking the evidence for what lit-
tle it is worth, the editors of The Times may feel that
there is no great reason to fear that their position
on the issues of these years was mistaken.

This period, between the Spanish War and the
World War, was the age of muckraking; the day
of a great emotional revival in American public life;
of a new infusion of morality into politics, and of
politics into morality.

The Times during this carnival of purity was com-
pelled to preserve its attitude of conscientious skep-
ticism, and consequently was as unpopular with fol-
lowers of the new gospel as the village infidel at pro-
tracted meeting; for it steadfastly refused to stagger
down to the mourners' bench. And now the revival
is over, and most of those who hit the sawdust trail
have fallen from grace and gone back to walk in
darkness till the next day of Pentecost. The Times

270

CONSERVATISM, INDEPENDENCE, 1900-1914

contemplates their side-slips without exultation;
rather with a certain sadness. It would be a won-
derful thing if life were what the reformers thought
it was, but experience has shown that it is not. It
was the painful duty of The Times, at the height of
the revival, to remind the reformers of the lessons of
experience; to express its doubts as to the value of
measures which introduced new evils without cur-
ing the old; and to suggest that neither was the
past as black as it was painted, nor could the future
reasonably be expected to be one unspotted smear
of rose-color. This is what conservatism means,
and The Times is not ashamed of it.

The attitude of The Times toward union labor has
been pretty widely misrepresented. The Times be-
lieves in trades unionism as a valuable contribution
to the national well being. It does not think, how-
ever, that the followers of the organized trades are
the whole people, or a specially privileged part of the
people. It believes that the American Federation
of Labor has rendered very great services to the
nation at large as well as to the men enrolled in it,
but it believes that the members of the Federation
are part of the people, and that their interests can-
not be considered apart from the general interest.

For those movements, mostly outside the Federa-
tion, which tend toward syndicalism The ^ Times has
no sympathy, for it believes that syndicaHsm is mor-
ally and economically unsound. When the railroad
brotherhoods hold up the Government as they did
in 1916, the Government is more to blame than the
railroad brotherhoods; but The Times has been un-

271

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

able to regard the railroads as existing solely for the
interest of their employes.

The Times does not pretend to have a patented
cure for industrial ills, nor to know where that cure
can be found. It does have a pretty strong sus-
picion, however, as to where it cannot be found.
Socialists and syndicalists object to the trades union
philosophy that it implies a constant state of indus-
trial war, or at best of industrial truce, between
employer and employe. The Times has not found
it so in practice.

When the new publisher took over The Times in
1896 he discovered that the composing room was
heavily, even ruinously, overmanned. The pub-
lisher felt that as a matter both of right and of
expediency this condition should be discussed with
the union officials, and a conference with the then
head of Typographical Union No. 6 made it plain
that that gentleman's ideas of a fair day's work for
a fair day's pay coincided with those of the pub-
lisher of The Times; so the payroll of the compos-
ing room was reduced ^1000 a week without any
lessening of its efficiency. The composing room has
since found plenty of work for several times the
number of men then employed, but relations have
always been good, and such differences as arose have
always been settled in an amicable manner.

272

CHAPTER III

Modern News-gathering, 1900-1914

O much for the editorial poUcies from 1900 to
' 1914. The period under discussion was, how-
ever, above all a period of development in the news
service of The Times. All the newspapers in New
York had a better idea of what was news in 1914
than they had in 1900, all of them knew more about
what to do with news when they had it, and though
they made less noise about the getting of the news
than they had been inchned to do in the nineties,
they got more news and more reliable news than they
had ever done before. In this gradual improvement
The Times led the way. Whatever its relative posi-
tion in New York journalism — which is a matter
of opinion, perhaps — that position was higher m
1914 than in 1900. It was to become higher still
during the war, but in the years before the war
was laid the foundation of the great organization for
getting and pubhshing the news which is the chief
distinction of The Times today.

The history of the paper's growth in this period
is not easy to tell, for it is not a matter of isolated
"beats," of great individual achievements rising
from a level plain of daily routine, of great crusades
or magnificent exposures. The Times has had plenty
of "beats" and has shown its enterprise in digging
up more than one neglected field of the news, but

273

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

its real preeminence is a matter of high average
rather than of scattered peaks of achievement. Day
in and day out it gets more news, and handles it
more intelHgentl}^ than any paper knew how to do
a decade or two ago; and this implies, obviously,
the slow assembling of an especially competent staff,
the indoctrination of every man with a gradually
evolved set of principles, as well as unusually effi-
cient direction from above. The Times as a news-
paper is far from perfect; its conductors know that
better than anybody else. Its news-gatherers may
overlook some things; its editors may make mis-
takes in dealing with what they have to give the
public. But there can be no very serious doubt
that The Times makes fewer mistakes of this sort
than its contemporaries.

In the building of this news organization credit
must be given to the men at the top — to Henry
Loewenthal, at present in charge of the business
news department, whose connection with The Times
began in 1875 and who was managing editor from
1896 to 1904; to Arthur Greaves, city editor from
1900 to 191 5; to William C. Reick, who from 1906
to 191 2 was associated with the general manage-
ment of the paper, and chiefly to Carr V. Van
Anda, who has been managing editor since 1904 and
has been most directly concerned with the extraor-
dinary development of the news department and
with reaching its highest peak. Under all these
men The Times was steadily coming into prominence
as a paper which, while giving less attention than
some of its contemporaries to spectacular demon-
strations of its enterprise, was learning how to get

274

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the news wherever it happened and about as soon
as it happened, and to present it to the public with
some appreciation of its relative importance and
interest.

A business connection which has already been
mentioned deserves somewhat more detailed notice
here, for in the earlier years of this period it proved
of considerable value. This was the "alliance for
mutual interest and advantage" with The London
Times ^ begun on September 2, 1901. No doubt this
alliance has been the pretext — it could hardly be
called the excuse — for much of the belief that The
New York Times is owned or controlled by Lord
NorthclifFe. In fact, it was precisely what it was
called at the time, an alliance for mutual benefit.
The alliance consisted only of this — that The New
York Times bought the full rights for publication in
North America of The London Times news service,
The London Times receiving reciprocal rights to
The New York Times news service for publication
in England. It was an arrangement of the same
general character as those which the paper now
maintains with The London Daily Chronicle, the
Paris Matin and The Chicago Tribune, To suppose
that it involves ownership of The New York Times
in England is very much the same as saying that a
man is owned by the restaurant where he occasion-
ally dines.

As for Lord Northcliffe, a genius in newspaper
making, he had nothing to do with The London Times
when this contract was concluded. That paper was
then owned by the Walter family, and managed by the
Walters and Moberly Bell. The arrangement was

275

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

continued for some years after Lord NorthclifFe
bought The London Times, but relations with him were
sharply broken off at the beginning of the World
War because of some difference of opinion between
him and the management of The New York Times
with respect to news exchange arrangements. This
has been told so often that very few of those who
still repeat the story of a Northcliffe influence on
The New York Times have even the poor excuse of
ignorance.

Aside from its effect in furnishing nonexplosive
ammunition for credulous Sinn Feiners, the con-
nection was on the whole a useful one. It was most
useful at the beginning, when the relative position
of the two papers was not quite what it is today.
In the early years of the twentieth century it gave
The New York Times a connection with a worldwide
news service of much intrinsic value and still greater
reputation, which proved particularly valuable in
the Russo-Japanese War. Later on it was less im-
portant, for The New York Times was becoming able
to collect the news of the world on its own initia-
tive; not so much by means of a widely traveling
staff of special correspondents as by a few centralized
offices which had learned how to get the earliest re-
ports from almost anywhere.

Much of the development of The Times news de-
partment has a purely technical or intramural in-
terest, but a good deal of it has such bearing on
the general improvement in journalistic methods
that it deserves to rank almost as a public service.
This is especially true of the paper's share in the

276

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

development of wireless telegraphy. To Marconi
and the other men who were perfecting that inven-
tion in the early years of the twentieth century The
Times gave not only publicity and encouragement
but sometimes a rather insistent support which drove
them on to do more than they would ever have
dreamed they could do if there had been nobody
there to tell them. The war would undoubtedly
have forced the development of long-distance wire-
less in any case, but it is due in some degree to The
New York Times that the art was so far advanced
as it was when the war began.

In the early years of wireless the interest of The
Times was chiefly, if not wholly, that of a newspaper
eager to give the news. Marconi's announcement
on December 14, 1901, that transatlantic communi-
cation had been established between Poldhu, Corn-
wall, and St. John's, Newfoundland, received the
display in the news columns, and the enthusiastic
comment in the editorial columns, which its im-
portance warranted. But these first transmissions
went no farther than the sending across the Atlantic
of a single letter — S — whose three dots in the
Morse code, repeated at stated intervals, did indeed
convince the inventor that he could send a message
from Europe to America, but left him far short of
the goal of a service which would be commercially
useful. His experiments were continued, without
much publicity; and by a curious accident The
New York Times was deprived of the news of one of
the most interesting of these experiments, the dis-
patch of the first transatlantic wireless press message.

On December 16, 1902, Dr. (afterward Sir) George
' 277

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

R. Parkin, then one of the correspondents of The
London Times, visited Marconi at his new station
at Glace Bay, Nova Scotia. By this time Marconi
was able to send matter eastward across the Atlantic
with fair success, though he had had little luck with
westward messages. Dr. Parkin wrote out and sent
a twenty-five-word Marconigram to The London
Times, expressing the sentiments proper to the oc-
casion, and then came back to New York and told
for the first time the thrilling story of the epoch-
making event, of the successful transmission of a
message, without wires, across the Atlantic, and
of the progress Marconi was making. The con-
ductors of The New York Ti7nes, however, were
deeply interested in what Marconi was doing, and
they were delighted to learn that Dr. Parkin had
written an account, some two thousand words in
length, of what he was the first newspaper repre-
sentative permitted to witness.

Since the alliance between the two papers was
hen in force. Dr. Parkin had the story typed on
New York Times stationery and mailed it himself,
in a plain envelope, to his paper in London. A car-
bon copy was left in The New York Times office, to
be published simultaneously with the London pub-
lication; The New York Times was to be advised
by cable of The London Times^s receipt of the story.
The editors waited for days and weeks and the mes-
sage did not arrive. And at last Dr. Parkin's origi-
nal story came back through the dead letter office,
refused at The London Times office because of in-
sufficient postage calling for the payment of surtax
refund. Years later one of the managers of The

278

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

London Times explained this by saying that that
paper received an enormous amount of unsoHcited
correspondence from all over the world, and that
such of it as did not have enough postage paid was
declined. Whatever Lord NorthclifFe may have done
to The London Times, it is probable that its mail no
longer goes back to the Post Office unopened.

It was years later before Marconi was able to
open up a regular transatlantic service, and in the
meantime The Nezv York Times had so unfailingly
displayed its confidence in him that when regular
service was begun between CHfden, Ireland, and
Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, on October 17, 1907, the
first message accepted for transmission westward
came to the paper from its London office. Of the
ten thousand words or so sent by wireless that
night a good deal was Nezv York Times news, and
one of the dispatches from the Paris office carried
a message of greeting from Georges Clemenceau,
then Premier for the first time. Naturally The Times
made a great display story of the opening of regular
wireless communications, and among the '* follows''
which it printed the next morning was Dr. Parkin's
account of his experience nearly five years before.

For some years thereafter a considerable propor-
tion of The Times European news for the Sunday
issue came through by wireless, but the delays in
transmission were so great that the most important
news was generally sent by cable. When the regu-
lar Marconi service was first opened most of the
cable company officials had taken it rather lightly,
and some were incredulous. Others professed to be-
lieve that its competition would not be dangerous;

279

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and for a matter of four years they were justified.
Some of them foresaw that eventually wireless might
carry a much higher percentage of transatlantic mes-
sages than it could handle in 1907, but they were
optimistic enough to think that there would be
plenty of business for all. And they were right;
the war and the continuing interest in European
news which survived the war have kept both wire-
less and cables busy enough.

But from 1907 to 191 2 the wireless service could
not be depended on for sure and speedy transmis-
sion of important news. Since the wireless rate was
only five cents a word, and the minimum cable rate
on press messages was double that, the wireless was
used wherever possible. In those days The Times
published two or three pages of general European
news in one of its Sunday sections — society and
fashion notes, the movements of American tourists,
and such similar items as occupied most of the little
attention that was given by Americans to European
affairs before the war — and the wireless was useful
and cheap for this sort of service. A story written
on Thursday did not need to get to the office on
Friday if it was intended for the Sunday paper. In
those days The Times did a great deal more for the
wireless companies than the wireless companies did
for The Times; every dispatch was carefully marked
**By Marconi Wireless Telegraph," and the value of
this acknowledgment was undoubtedly great.

Still the wireless remained distinctly a secondary
matter; anything urgent had to be put on the cables.
And this might have continued indefinitely if The
Times had not been moved to some reflections, early

280

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

in January, 191 2, by the chance consideration of a
wireless message which had come through from Lon-
don in five hours. This was considerably less than
the average time required for ordinary press mes-
sages by the Marconi service, and on reflection no
reason was seen why there should be even this
much delay. The Hertzian waves traveled fast
enough for any taste; the delays, then, must be in
the land connections from European capitals to
Clifden, and from Glace Bay to New York.

It was the old story of the early days of news-
gathering, when the utmost speed in getting Euro-
pean news to Cape Race might be nulHfied by the
indolence of a telegraph operator in the Maine woods.
Once smooth out the land connections and there was
no reason why wireless could not come as fast as
cables. So The Times suddenly informed the offi-
cials of the Marconi company that on an appointed
date, about two weeks ahead, it would give them
its entire London business. Suggestions for the
prompt handling of this business were offered by
The Times, Wires to Glace Bay were arranged for
by the paper, and after much insistence by The
Times the Marconi officials managed to get better
service to Chfden. At the time named the new serv-
ice was begun, and was a success from the start.
From the middle of January, 191 2, to the outbreak
of the war virtually all of The Times dispatches from
London came by wireless; they arrived in good
time; and in the beginning nobody was so surprised
at the achievement as the officials of the wireless
company.

Present-day readers of The Times will remember
281

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the page — usually the third or fourth — headed
**By Marconi Wireless Telegraph to The New
York Times'' — which in those days contained each
morning all the European news of interest to Ameri-
can readers, except in the cases when something
was important enough for the front page. If the
wireless companies were startled, the cable com-
panies were scandalized. The suspicion that this
matter did not come by wireless at all was rather
widely expressed; every cable company thought it
was sent over the Hnes of its competitors. One of
the chief cable experts in Germany, with truly Ger-
man inability to realize that what had once been
true was not necessarily still true, insisted weeks
after the new plan was adopted that The Times was
still getting all its foreign news by cable. There
were men in Germany, however, who understood
well enough the possibilities of the wireless tele-
graph, and the time was not far away when Ger-
many was to make more use of it than anybody
ever dreamed in 191 2.

When the war broke out the military importance
of the wireless telegraph caused considerable restric-
tions to be placed on its use, but it proved invaluable,
particularly to American correspondents in Germany
before 191 7. It would probably have come into gen-
eral use during the war in any case, but its impor-
tance would not have been so promptly recognized
if The Times had not demonstrated two years earlier
that the wireless was capable of doing a great deal
of work in very good time. It is not pretended that
the paper's motives in giving invaluable advertising
and a very necessary stimulus to the wireless com-

282

MAJOR JULIUS

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ASSISTANTS TO THE PUBLISHER.

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

panics were entirely altruistic; when it had shown
the wireless experts what they could do it got its
European news at half the price of cables. As soon
as other newspapers woke up sufficiently to realize
what could be and was being done, they shared in
the benefit.

In other uses of the wireless The Times was again
a pioneer. The naval fighting off Port Arthur in
the Russo-Japanese War was covered for The London
Times and The New York Times by Capt. Lionel
James in a dispatch boat equipped with the De
Forest wireless, through which he maintained com-
munication from 150 miles out at sea with the cable
station at Wei-Hai-Wei. The naval battle of April
13, 1904, for instance, in which the Russian flag-
ship Petropavlovsk was sunk, was reported to
The Times from both land and sea — the official
Russian version from Port Arthur coming by
way of Petrograd, and Captain James's eyewitness
reports sent by wireless from his boat and cables
from Wei-Hai-Wei. Throughout the fighting around
Port Arthur The Times thus had a long lead over
its competitors — for though the Japanese Army was
the first to break the long domination of war by the
correspondents who wrote about it, and to intro-
duce the modern idea that the war correspondent's
place is in the home, their naval authorities had not
yet sufficiently realized the importance and possible
danger of wireless communication to put any restric-
tion on James's activities. Perhaps, too, in that
particular war the Japanese felt a certain reluctance
to hamper the correspondent who represented the
leading newspaper of an allied country, and what

283

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

was becoming one of the most important papers
in the most friendly neutral nation.

The C Q D call from the White Star liner Republic,
sinking in collision on January 23, 1909, which
brought up other ships in time to save her 1600
passengers, may have been obliterated from the
memory of most readers by the greater and more
spectacular marine disasters of more recent years;
but it was a great news story in its day, and
the more so since it was the first prominent in-
stance in which wireless had proved of immense
value in saving life at sea. All the papers had that
story, of course, though the Republic^ s wireless oper-
ator as a matter of course sent his story to The Times.
If The Times handled the news somewhat better
than some of the others, it was only because by
that time The Times was learning the art of han-
dling big stories with a thoroughness which had not
yet been known in New York journalism. As a
matter of fact, the first actual wireless call for help
had come nearly three years earlier — from the
Nantucket lightship, battered by storms, on De-
cember 10, 1905. There again it was everybody's
story. But The Times shares with The Chicago Trib-
une the distinction of having printed the first news
story sent by wireless of a rescue at sea. The
freighter St. Cuthbert, afire oflF Cape Sable, on Feb-
ruary 2, 1908, was sighted by the liner Cymric, which
managed to rescue in a heavy sea thirty-seven of her
crew of fifty-one. A correspondent of The Chicago
Tribune aboard the Cymric sent the story to his own
paper as soon as the liner was near enough to shore
for the short-distance wireless of those days to com-

284

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

municate with shore stations, and having sent the
news he remembered that The New York Times was
interested in anything connected with wireless teleg-
raphy, and accordingly sent a query by wireless to find
out if the paper wanted the story. It did, and it got it.

These episodes of the past seem commonplace
enough today, when the wireless is as much a mat-
ter of course as the telegraph; when The Times has,
as it has had for more than a year past, its own
receiving station just off the news room on the third
floor of the Times Annex, and receives there in addi-
tion to its own dispatches everything else that comes
through the air, even from such a distance as the
Russian frontier, where the Bolshevist wireless oper-
ators are sending out the daily fiction feuilleton of
the Soviet Government. But in their day they were
considerable achievements, requiring not only a good
deal of work but a good deal of imagination and faith.

Somewhat similar to certain of these demonstra-
tions of the possibility of wireless telegraphy was
the round-the-world cable message sent by The Times
to itself on August 20, 191 1. The Commercial
Cable Company had then lately opened its Pacific
line, and The Times wanted to see just what could
be done in the way of getting a message from New
York across the country, across the Pacific, up
through the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean
and back to New York. A brief dispatch was re-
ceived in the ofl&ce sixteen and a half minutes after
it was sent, and this without any preliminary 'smooth-
ing of the way such as speeds the congratulatory
messages of Kings and Presidents opening a new line.
To the nonprofessional reader this may seem pur-

285

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

poseless, a mere advertising of The Times and inci-
dentally of the cable companies. But it was not.
It was a test of the possible speed of transmission
of messages under ordinary conditions; it gave the
editors of The Times some data by which they could
estimate what ought to be expected in the case of
real news, and thereby would necessarily keep the
cable companies somewhat more alert to see that
in the sending of news messages there would be no
inexplicable delays.

Perhaps, to complete the record of The Times in-
terest in wireless telegraphy, it should be mentioned
that the publisher of The Times bought some shares
of stock in the American Marconi Company. He
bought them at the market price, of course; bought
them partly because he believed in the future of
wireless telegraphy and thought they would be a
good investment, and largely because he wanted to
promote the development of an industry that prom-
ised increased facilities and reduced rates for inter-
national communications. This stock he eventually
sold at a considerable loss. It deserves mention here
only because the incident was distorted to make it
appear that Mr. Ochs was in some mysterious way
"involved in the English Marconi scandal." And
although he never owned, bought or sold a single
share of English Marconi stock, there are no doubt
some people who have believed the story. As has
been observed above, the people who will believe
anything are regrettably numerous.

Another of the modern arts in whose development
The Times took a keen interest was aviation. In the

286

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

decade before the war, indeed, aviation and wireless
were the two chief special interests of the office.
The Times published more news about their progress
than its contemporaries, and gradually acquired a
sort of special position in both aviation and wireless
news, which attracted to it automatically a good
deal of information about the progress of these arts.
But in aviation as in wireless The Times did more
than merely give publicity to what was going on. It
promoted and inspired a good deal of the develop-
ment in the early years of the new invention, and
more than once was able to incite the experts to the
accomplishment of things which of their own accord
they would never have attempted. For in those days
the art of aviation and of airplane construction was
rather primitive. An airplane was a dangerous and
incalculable machine, just how dangerous and incal-
culable fliers alone knew. Editors of The Times, who
did not have to do the flying, were perhaps rather
insistent that the aviators should crowd their luck
and see how far they could develop their art; but
the fact remains that many of these enterprises
would not have been attempted if the aviators had
not been prodded — and none of them met with
any misadventure while working for The Times.

One of the first big display stories about aviation
which The Times printed dealt with an exhibition
promoted by another paper. On May 29, 1910,
Glenn Curtiss flew from Albany to New York for a
prize offered by The World. With an entirely rea-
sonable caution, Mr. Curtiss was rather slow in get-
ting away — so slow that The World apparently lost
faith in him and announced that another aviator

287

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

was on the way to Albany and would probably make
the flight before Curtiss did. The Times had more
confidence in Curtiss, as well as a fuller realization
of the importance of this demonstration of the powers
of the airplane; so when Curtiss did start, The Times
was right under him with a special train and cov-
ered the whole story much more fully than The
World. A fortnight later, on June 13, 1910, Claude
Hamilton flew from New York to Philadelphia and
back in a single day for a prize off'ered by The Times.
Eleven years have brought such progress in avia-
tion that it is hard to realize what an achievement
this was at the time; as a matter of fact, Hamil-
ton's machine broke down in Jersey on the return
trip, had to be patched up, and was brought back to
New York at very great risk to the flier.

In October of the same year The Times and The
Chicago Evening Post promoted an aviation meet at
Chicago, at the end of which there was to be a race
from Chicago to New York for a ^25,000 prize of-
fered by the two papers. The meet was a great
success, artistically and financially; so great a suc-
cess in the latter respect that the aviation company
which got the gate receipts was rather reluctant to
hazard its machines and its fliers on a trip to New
York even for ^25,000. At last, however, on Oc-
tober 10, Eugene Ely did make the attempt, only
to come down just over the Indiana line. Aviation
engineers tinkered with his engine for days and fi-
nally concluded that it was impossible to go on; not
till later was it discovered that nothing was the mat-
ter with it except that a clot of mud had stopped up
an air valve and prevented ignition. But for that,

288

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

there is a chance that the flight from Chicago to
New York — possibly even a non-stop flight —
might have been completed without mishap.

It was six years before The Times again tried to
promote a flight from Chicago to New York. This
time it was to be a non-stop flight, with Victor Carl-
strom of the Curtiss staff trying it alone. In that
interval the war had forced aviation to an unex-
pected development, and fliers in Europe were doing
things that could not have been dreamed of three
or four years earlier. But once more the attempt
was unsuccessful as a non-stop flight, and again be-
cause of a trivial mishap — a loose nut on a feed
pipe which had somehow escaped the attention of
the battahon of engineers and mechanics who had
examined the machine. Carlstrom spent the night
at Hammondsport, N. Y., and finished the flight to
New York next day. This episode is notable also
in that the American Telephone and Telegraph Com-
pany developed for The Tunes a quite efficient news
service, having instructed all its agents along the
line of Carlstrom's flight to keep watch for the aviator
and report instantly when he appeared.

Always in those years The Times was eager to find
out what aviators were doing, and to encourage them
to do still more. Among its other endeavors to pro-
mote aerial navigation may be mentioned the offer
of a cup for a flight from Boston to Washington in
July, 191 1, which was won by Harry Atwood, and
its promotion of an air race around Manhattan Is-
land in October, 191 3, in connection with the Aero-
nautical Society's meet. Not long after that the
war broke out, and aviation was forced to a devel-

289

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

opment which no longer needed any journalistic
stimulus.

The two great special interests of The Times were
combined in an enterprise which the paper promoted
in conjunction with The Londo7i Daily Telegraph
and The Chicago Record-Herald in October, 1910 —
Walter Wellman's attempt to fly across the Atlantic
in a dirigible balloon. Wellman succeeded in flying
about a thousand miles, but unfortunately not in a
straight line, as a northeast wind caught him off"
Nantucket and drove him down to the latitude of
Hatteras, where he and his companions were rescued
by a passing steamer. Though the attempt to cross
the Atlantic was unsuccessful, Wellman's dirigible,
of course infinitely more primitive than the airships
which finally did make the flight in 1919, made a
record creditable enough for that period. In the first
hours of the flight Wellman kept in communication
with The Times by wireless — the first time, as far
as can be learned, that an aviation story was cov-
ered by wireless from the air — and the wireless
again brought the news of his rescue out at sea,
though in this case the messages were dispatched
from the rescuing steamer.

The automobile business was at this period going
through the transition from a dangerous sport of the
idle rich to a basic industry meeting the needs of the
proletariat. Automobile news for a long time was
prominent in every paper, more prominent than it
is now, because the automobile attracted both a
sporting and a commercial interest. Its promotion,
however, was being taken care of by so many people

290

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

that The Times, though pubHshing very full and
trustworthy automobile news, had no occasion to do
in this field anything like its work in aviation and
wireless. One event, however, it did promote — a
New York-to-Paris automobile race, in collaboration
with the Paris Matin, early in 1908.

If one single news story published in The Times in
this period were to be m.arked out as more famous
than all the rest, it would have to be Admiral Peary's
story of the discovery of the North Pole. Before
Peary started north on his final trip The Times had
arranged for exclusive news publication of his story
in New York and had agreed to act as his agent in
seUing other rights. It had advanced $4000 to him,
as he needed that much to make the expedition pos-
sible, to be repaid out of the profits from the use and
sale of the rights to Peary's story of the trip. As
it turned out, Peary's story sold so well that he
realized through The Times nearly three times this
amount.

It was, accordingly, a good deal of a disappoint-
ment to the conductors of The Times when early in
September, 1909, Peary being still absent beyond
communication in the north, the little known Dr.
Frederick Cook suddenly appeared en route to
Copenhagen and announced that he had discovered
the Pole on April 21 of the previous year.

The Times' s reaction to the news was, however,
about the same as the reaction of nearly everybody
else. It was inchned to give Dr. Cook the benefit
of the doubt, and, when more details of his alleged
exploit began to come in and proved to be vague,

291

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

confusing and rather suspicious, The Times was still,
like most other people, inclined to wait for proof
before discrediting the story.

But all this was changed when on September 6,
while Cook was dining with the King of Denmark
and receiving all the honors that Copenhagen could
bestow, Peary reached Indian Harbor and sent word
to The Times by wireless and cable that he had
found the Pole. Everybody believed Peary; he was
an explorer and scientist of the highest standing,
and the whole world took his word. The trouble
began a day or two later when Peary informed his
family, and the public, that Cook's story need not
be taken seriously. By that time Cook had sold
the right of publication of his narrative to The New
York Herald, which had syndicated it everywhere.
It turned out to be a bad bargain for The Herald,
but it was an excellent bargain for Cook in more
ways than one. Aside from the price he received —
which, according to rumor, was, through a mistake
in cable transmission, ten times what he had asked,
but which to James Gordon Bennett seemed not
exorbitant for what Cook had to offer — he found
at once a large number of newspapers enrolled on
his side and compelled in their own interest to ad-
vocate his claims to the very last.

It may be said that The Times was in luck and
The Herald was out of luck. But it was not a ques-
tion of luck; The Times had reason for putting up
money for Peary's story before he started north, for
he was the most experienced and probably the most
renowned of Arctic explorers. In so far as success
in reaching the Pole was not a matter of chance,

29Z

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

Peary was a better bet than anybody else. Ben-
nett's purchase of Cook's story, after Cook had as-
serted that he had discovered the Pole, was natural
enough, for nobody knew much about Cook then.
It must be regarded as an unfortunate lapse from
impartiality of judgment, however, that the papers
which had published Cook's story for the most part
felt that they had to believe it, or at any rate to
pretend that they beheved it.

Peary's detailed story came through by wireless
rather slowly, and was published in The Times on
September 9, 10 and 11, 1909. In the meantime a
correspondent of The London Chronicle, Philip Gibbs,
who was to become famous as a war correspondent
a few years later — and more famous through the
American publication of his work in The New York
Times and papers which bought the news from The
Times than even his home paper made him — had
subjected Dr. Cook and his story to an intensive
study, and had come to the conclusion that there
was nothing in it. For a few days Gibbs was almost
alone in saying this outright, but Peary's heated de-
nunciations of Cook forced the issue and the world-
wide civil war was on. In the promotion of domestic
strife in every nation, in the setting of households
against each other and bringing not peace, but a
sword to every breakfast table. Cook and Peary did
better than Lenin and Trotzky ever dreamed of

doing.

That war is ancient history, and there is no longer
any doubt as to who was right. The Times, which
had obtained the North Pole story on its own ini-
tiative, was equally successful in obtaining the ac-

293

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

counts of the two discoveries of the South Pole by
Amundsen and Scott, though in both cases it could
do no more than buy the American rights from
British owners — in the case of Scott, the Central
News; in the case of Amundsen, The London Chron-
icle. Of course, exclusive rights to American publi-
cation of great news stories of this sort were not
any too widely respected. The narratives of Amund-
sen and Scott were stolen and published by other
newspapers, though The Times owned the copyright.
Naturally, The Times sued all the New York news-
papers that republished these stories without per-
mission. The suits failed on technical points. The
common-law sanction of a right of prior pubHcation
by the purchaser or gatherer of news, finally estab-
hshed in the litigation by which The Associated
Press compelled the Hearst services to stop the prac-
tice of '* lifting" Associated Press bulletins, had not
yet been established when these cases were tried,
and The Times got no material compensation from
those who had infringed its rights. But its lawsuits
did have one important and valuable result; at each
successive stage of the suits, when technical decisions
went against The Times, the appropriating news-
papers gleefully announced their victory, telling
their readers over and over how The Times had
bought the news but they had been able to take
it and '*get away with it." This unintentional ad-
vertisement of The Times was quite helpful.

Of the great news stories of the period to which
everybody had access, and in dealing with which an
individual newspaper could distinguish itself only by
specially competent treatment, the one most vividly

294

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

remembered in The Times office is the sinking of the
Titanic in April, 191 2. The Times was more for-
tunate than other papers in handHng that story cor-
rectly from the moment when the news of the first
wireless call for help was received in newspaper
offices. "More fortunate*' is the proper term, for the
general conviction that the Titanic was unsinkable
was so strong, and so gallantly maintained for
twenty-four hours after the disaster by the officials
of the White Star Line, that there was good excuse
for reluctance to believe that the disaster had been
serious.

It happened that The Times by careful compari-
son of the first dispatches about the collision with
the iceberg and by repeated inquiries of its own
promptly made up its mind that the Titanic was
gone. It held to that view all through the con-
fused reports of the next day, even though officials
of the line still asserted that there was no news con-
firming the suspicion; and it was right.

When the Carpathia landed with the survivors
The Times covered the story more completely than
any other New York paper, though they all did
their best. One feature, the stories told by the
Titanic^s two wireless operators, though arranged
for by wireless before the Carpathians arrival, could
not have been obtained when the ship docked but
for the opportune assistance of Senator Marconi;
but the rest of the news was gathered by the dili-
gence of The Times^s own reporters, who performed
feats of interviewing on that night which showed
the high standard of news-getting ability to which the
staff had been brought. Altogether, the paper

295

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

printed fifteen pages of news about the Titanic the
next morning. Its work on this famous story ex-
cited widespread admiration, and members of The
Times staff visiting the offices of European news-
papers have been gratified to learn that some of
them had considered copies of The Times of that
period worthy of preservation as models to be studied.
Even certain New York editors wrote to friends in
The Times office expressing ungrudging admiration.

The Times^s political news in this period was
steadily gaining wider recognition for trustworthiness.
Like everything else on The Times, the political cor-
respondence was less spectacular than that of some
other papers, but in the long run it was apt to be
more trustworthy. There were, however, a number
of outstanding feats of news enterprise which sup-
plied the spectacular element from time to time.
Such was, for example, the publication in advance
of the draft of the Republican national platform of
1908, as drawn up by the leaders of the Roosevelt
forces at the convention. President Roosevelt at
once went into eruption upon seeing this news in
The Times, and declared that it was not a correct
version. But when the platform was adopted and
made known to the world it was found to differ
only in half a dozen minor points of phraseology
from the version printed in The Times — which, of
course, was presented as nothing more than the
draft agreed on by the dominating Rvoosevelt faction
at the time of publication. This achievement set
a precedent to which Times political reporters have
managed to live up ever since; in most subsequent

296

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

campaign years The Times has managed to obtain
the platform of one or the other national conven-
tions before it was formally given out to the press
at large.

Accomplishments such as this are the result of
long preparation; they imply a well-organized staff
of veteran political reporters with a wide acquaint-
ance, with many friends in high place, and with
qualities that command confidence. An illustration
of the competence of The Times political staff under
different circumstances was afforded at Mr. Taft's
inauguration in 1909. It may be remembered that
in that year a blizzard suddenly descended on Wash-
ington on the night of March 3, and by the time
the inauguration ceremonies had been concluded the
next day practically all the telephone and telegraph
wires leading out of the town were out of commis-
sion. The stories of the day's events written by
The Times staff were prepared in quintuplicate.
One copy was kept on file in the office of the Wash-
ington correspondent of The Times, and all through
the evening desperate but unavailing efforts were
made to get this through on the leased wires or by
telephone. Another was filed with the Western
Union for transmission on any other wires they
might be able to open. Two more were dispatched
by messengers on trains for New York. Both trains
were held up by snowdrifts, but one of them reached
Philadelphia late at night and the copy was tele-
graphed on by The Times correspondent there. But
before it reached the office, most of the news had
already arrived. The Times managed to find a tele-
graph wire open from Washington to New Orleans,

297

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

and the fifth copy of each story was sent over that
wire to New Orleans, thence to Chicago, thence to
Albany, and finally into the office in New York,
circhng the area devastated by the bhzzard. The
Times had all its special dispatches about the inau-
guration in its first edition the next morning.

The Times was able on occasion not only to get
news from politicians but to send news to politicians.
During the Democratic National Convention at
Baltimore in 191 2 special trains brought down every
morning the city edition of The Times, so that be-
fore the morning sessions had begun the delegates
were reading the news of what they had been doing
up to four or five o'clock that morning — and since
the work of national conventions is mostly done after
midnight in smoke-filled rooms, there is a big dif-
ference between the first edition and the last edition
in convention week. It might be mentioned here
that during the Republican convention at Chicago
last year The Times sent a moderately late edition,
carrying news received up to three a.m., to Chicago
by airplane.

In 1903 Thomas A. Janvier wrote for The Times
a. series of articles on the early history of New York,
and the paper announced a competition for the
school children of the city in the writing of essays
based on Janvier's articles. The interest aroused
by this was enormous. In thousands of homes the
entire family was excited by the son's or daughter's
effort to win one of the prizes or medals offered for
the best compositions, and the result was not only
an increase in the circulation of The Times, which, of

298

LAYING THE CORNERSTONE,
TIMES BUILDING, JANUARY 18, 1904.

TIMES SQUARE,
THE CENTRE FOR NEWS.

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

course, was the principal purpose of the competition,
but the educating of a great many children, and a
great many parents, in the past of a city whose his-
tory is less known to its inhabitants than probably
any other in America. It hardly needs to be said
that the increase in circulation created by this com-
petition would have been only temporary and illu-
sory if new readers attracted to The Times, who first
read it in order to see what chance Johnny or Gladys
was likely to have of getting a medal, had not found
that it was worth reading all the time. The con-
test was a good piece of advertising, but it would
not have brought results if the merchandise adver-
tised had not been satisfactory.

The results which it did bring were so gratifying
that The Times has done the same thing on several
occasions since then — notably in 1909, when in
commemoration of the Lincoln centenary there was
a competition of essays based on a series of articles
on the Hfe of Lincoln by Frederic Trevor Hill. But
though these competitions were always useful, both
to The Times and to those who participated in them,
none of the later ones had the effect of the first.
For in 1903 the idea had been new and striking in
its novelty; and it was so eflFective that all the
other papers soon imitated it.

But the story of those years is, after all, the story
of a steadily improving news service, a staff con-
stantly more alert for news, and better educated in
the handling of news. There are other stories, many
of them, that were important enough at the time,
but are hardly relevant to the history of The Times

299

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

as a whole. One or two of them may be mentioned
as indicative of certain tendencies which have be-
come more prominent in the character of The Times
in more recent years. When Theodore Roosevelt,
returning from Africa, made his famous speech at
the Guildhall, London, on June i8, 1910, The Times
had a verbatim report of it sent by cable. The
idea that the public would be interested in every
word of a speech delivered at a great distance was
then a novel one; it was still novel years later, in
the war, when The Times developed the habit of
publishing in full the speeches of Lloyd George, of
Bethmann-Hollweg, Hertling and Czernin, and
other leaders of the European Governments. In
this process, which may be described as the docu-
mentation of current history. The Times has always
maintained a long lead over its rivals. Other papers
may think that the public does not want to read
long speeches, and will be satisfied with a summary
and a few quotations. The Times has found that
at least in such a crisis as the World War a large
part of the public is interested in long speeches, ver-
batim speeches; that on some occasions every word
of such speeches is news. Roosevelt's Guildhall
speech was news, and deserved to be printed in full.
As a matter of /act, the idea that a speech which
would be printed in full if it were delivered in New
York, with an advance copy sent to the city editor,
can be dismissed with a column summary if it is
delivered in London or Paris, has no sound founda-
tion. It rests on a tradition coming down from the
days when cables were few and press cablegrams
necessarily brief and expensive. With modern facili-

300

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

ties of communication, there is no reason why news
from London, Paris and BerHn cannot be handled as
its importance deserves.

The great development of The Times sporting
news has come since the end of the war, but on cer-
tain occasions before the war it covered big sport-
ing events rather more fully than was its custom.
One of these was the Jeffries- Johnson fight at Reno
in 1910, when the stories sent by regular members
of The Times staff were supplemented by expert
criticism contributed by John L. Sullivan. Mr.
Sullivan, though then appearing for the first time
as a journalist, knew enough about prize fighting to
make, and defend, the prediction that Johnson was
going to win; which, being contrary to the wish and
belief of a majority of the public, brought to The
Times a. considerable volume of protest. However,
Sullivan was right. On the value of these occasional
contributions from outside experts there may be di-
vergent opinions; but at any rate the paper which
published the first literary works of Henry Adams
and John L. Sullivan may be credited with a cer-
tain breadth of taste, as well as with a keen reali-
zation of the variety of belletristic talent produced
in Boston.

Perhaps two matters of special interest to The
Times may here be mentioned, although their most
notable development falls in a later period. One of
the hobbies of the paper has been the protection of
the city parks. Special interests of this sort are
more in the line of some other New York papers; in
general The Times has not given much attention to

301

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

them, for while realizing that they offer consider-
able opportunities for public service it considers
them outside the field of straight newspaper work
to which it is devoted. Its interest in the parks,
however, has seemed necessary, since it is a duty
which has been neglected by others.

The number and variety of the schemes for the
invasion of city parks, especially Central Park, would
be inconceivable to those who have not had occasion
to study them. From such magnificent schemes as
the cutting up of the whole park into building lots
down to trivial incursions, ostensibly for special or
temporary purposes, almost every use has been
suggested for Central Park by persons who call them-
selves practical men. It has seemed to the manage-
ment of The Times that the most practical use of
Central Park, or any other park, is to keep it as a
park — as a place where residents of the city may
get into the open air and make some effort to get
back to a sort of nature. Some of the other plans
for using the park space have been well enough in-
tended, but The Times has always thought that New
York needed it as a park more than as an athletic
field, a site for pubHc buildings, or anything else.

The most notable incident in this long and
measurably successful struggle to preserve the park
against encroachments, and the most difficult, be-
cause the aims of those who wanted to invade the
park were excellent in themselves, was the "park
trench*' episode in the spring of 1918. The mem-
bers of the Liberty Loan Committee, then in the
fourth loan campaign, had allowed themselves to be
persuaded by an enthusiastic publicity man that

302

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

popular interest could be aroused by the exhibition
in New York of a model trench sector such as those
in which American soldiers were fighting in France

— which was correct — and that the place for this
exhibition was the Sheep Meadow in Central Park

— which to The Times seemed entirely erroneous.
The damage that would have been done to the park
by the digging of trenches, though considerable,
could have been repaired; the harm done to the idea
of the integrity of the park could not have been re-
paired. For that was in the palmy days of drives

— drives for all sorts of causes, most of them worthy.
The Liberty Loan campaigns being the greatest and
most obviously necessary drives, minor enterprises
were inclined to follow their lead. Had the prece-
dent once been established of using the park for
visual education of this sort, every drive that fol-
lowed would have come forward with the same de-
mand; and it would have been as difficult to draw
the Hne between drives which wanted to get into the
park as it was later found to discriminate between
campaigners who wanted space on the steps of the
Public Library, or the privilege of soliciting con-
tributions in the public schools.

The fight to keep the trenches out of the park is
perhaps remembered chiefly because it produced
Mayor Hylan's memorable remark about "art ar-
tists." But it is worthy of remembrance because it
succeeded in keeping the trenches out of the park.
In the course of the campaign The Times had occa-
sion to do a good deal in the way of educating the
public in the elementary philosophy of parks — a
task it had undertaken before, but never at such

303

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

length or with such earnestness. It may be hoped
that this effort was not without effect, and that a
somewhat larger percentage of the population of
New York City now understands that the purpose
of setting aside land for a park is to have a park,
and not to provide a convenient building site for
some structure intended for a worthy purpose, whose
promoters do not want to pay the current prices of
real estate.

The defense of the parks is a matter in which The
Times has felt under obligation to take up a public
duty neglected by others. The other special inter-
est of the paper mentioned above is still more pecu-
liarly its own, for it was invented by the pub-
lisher of The Times. This is the annual Christmas
appeal for the Hundred Neediest Cases, chosen from
the lists of four of the leading charitable societies in
the city. The appeal was first ipade in 191 2, and
aroused an interest that increased from year to
year. By 1920 the individual contributions had
mounted into the thousands, and a total of more
than ^111,000 was raised — every cent of which
goes directly to the relief of the cases whose history
is told in The Times, or others like them, and only
less needy, when the first hundred have been re-
lieved; for in several years the response was sufficient
to cover more than two hundred cases, comprehend-
ing about a thousand persons each year. The ad-
ministrative expenses come out of the general funds
of the charitable societies, so that all the money
raised by the appeals goes directly for relief. The
total of contributions in each year's appeal is here
tabulated:

304

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

1912 $ 3,630.88

1913 9>646.36

1914 i5>032.46

1915 31,819.92

1916 55792.45

1917 62,103.47

1918 81,097.57

1919 106,967.14

1920 111,131.00

What has been accompHshed by this appeal?
First of all, of course, the relief of hundreds of desti-
tute famiHes — the raising of hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars, most if not all of which would never
have been contributed to charity if The Times had
not, day after day, in the weeks before Christmas of
each year, presented the stories of these families who
were in desperate need. With few exceptions, the
cases selected for presentation in these appeals have
been famihes, or individuals, who needed only tem-
porary help in order to get back on their feet again
and become able to pay their way. That this result
has been achieved in hundreds of instances is proved
by the records of the charitable societies. Many
orphan children have been adopted into kindly
homes. Some of those who were aided in the earlier
years have since been listed among the contributors
to the fund. More and more of them will appear in
this character as time goes on, and children who
have been aided to get an education, or whose dis-
abled parents have been enabled to bring them up
properly, become self-supporting members of society.

But the wider usefulness of the annual campaigns
lies in the education of the public. Many people

305

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

who have never given to organized charity before
are stirred by this Christmas appeal; and when they
have once begun to learn something about the des-
titution which is always to be found in New York
City, their interest is apt to continue and they be-
come regular contributors. Some of them go fur-
ther and give personal attention to charitable work;
and all of them learn something about the nature of
that work, and the conditions which it is trying to
improve. The conductors of The Times do not
know the solution of the problem of poverty, nor
even if there is a solution; but they think that a so-
lution is more likely to be found if everybody
studies the problem.

These considerations were in large part responsi-
ble for the refusal, by the management of The TimeSy
of the offer of ^1,000,000 as a standing endowment,
the interest on which should be applied to the relief
of the Hundred Neediest Cases, on condition that
The Times should undertake the investigation of the
cases and the administration of the fund. A suffi-
cient reason for refusing this offer was the fact that
The Times is a newspaper and not a charitable so-
ciety, and that its conductors find that getting out a
newspaper takes all their time and ability. It was
felt that the gentleman who made this offer could
do more effective work for the relief of poverty if he
allowed his money to be handled by the people who
have given a lifetime of study and practice to relief
work.

Such a magnificent gift might have inclined other
possible contributors to think that the need had
already been met. And it can never be fully met,

306

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at least not until everybody in New York has come
to understand it. The educational value of the annual
campaigns has certainly been great, and is greater
every year. Indeed, they have already won their
place in literature; Mr. Robert W. Chambers pre-
sented as the heroine of one of his recent novels an
orphan who had been adopted by a wealthy gentle-
man after he had read her story as one of the
Hundred Neediest Cases.

On April i, 191 3, The Times abandoned the seven-
column page which it had presented to its readers
for the past forty-eight years and went to eight col-
umns. The change was chiefly due to a conviction
that the narrower column was somewhat easier to
read, but it was also based in some degree upon the
need of getting more reading matter into the paper
without increasing the size of the page. Already
the number of pages had increased, though it was
not yet foreseen that the time would come when the
paper would print forty pages on a week day, as
happened occasionally in 1919.

But The Times, increasing the quantity of its of-
fering to readers, had maintained the same quality
which it had always presented. It was still the
same solid, dignified, reliable paper; the only differ-
ence was that it was appealing to more and more
readers every year.

The average circulation, which had been more
than 102,000 in the jubilee year, rose gradually to
143,460 in 1907; leaped the next year to 172,880;
passed 200,000 in 191 1; reached 225,392 in 1912, and
was around the quarter-million mark at the out-

307

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

break of the war, when the great achievements of
The Times news service sent it leaping once more.

Though its worldwide renown was chiefly a growth
of the war years, The Times was already recognized
as one of the great newspapers of the country, great
not only in circulation and volume of business, but
in character. A good many people did not like the
kind of paper which The Times was and always had
been, but they had to admit that it was an excellent
paper of the kind, and more and more people every
year were coming to prefer that kind.

In the articles on New York journalism written
by Will Irwin for Collier s Weekly in 191 1 The Times
was called a "commercial newspaper'' — a some-
what curious epithet, since all newspapers are con-
ducted with the purpose, even if that object is not
always attained, of making a profit. Mr. Irwin was
compelled, however, to admit that The Times came
*'the nearest of any newspaper to presenting a truth-
ful picture of life in New York and the world at
large," and indeed his only criticism was that it did
not crusade. This, of course, was during the muck-
raking epoch, and it is a striking tribute to The
Times that in that day when every institution was
being violently assaulted a muckraker could find
nothing to say against the paper except that it did
not wield the muckrake.

The great news feats mentioned above all played
their part in attracting attention to the paper and
winning new readers, but it cannot be repeated too
often that in the newspaper business as in any other
business customers who are attracted by advertis-
ing can be held only by the quality of the merchan-

308

MODERN NEWS-GATHERING, 1900-1914

dise. For whatever reason people began to read
The Times, they continued to read it because they
found it an enterprising and trustworthy newspaper.
The essay competitions had taken it into the pubHc
schools, where in many cases it came to be regarded
as the best guide to current events. And in private
schools, too. The Times was always welcomed where
some of its competitors were regarded with a suspi-
cious eye. The proprietor of its ablest rival in the
morning newspaper field once graciously called at-
tention to the fact that The Ti7nes was the only
morning newspaper taken at the select school which
his daughter attended.

309

CHAPTER IV

Some Aspects of Business Policy

nnHE TIMES had begun to gain circulation very
-^ soon after the new pubHsher took charge. With
this, of course, went an enormous increase in the
business of the paper. There was built up an un-
usually efficient business department, managed for
many years past by Louis Wiley and previously by
the late John Norris. Within four years after the
assumption of control by the new management the
circulation of The Times, at the beginning of the
new century, had reached 100,000; ten years later
it had passed 200,000, and now in the twenty-fifth
year of the present management it circulates an
average of 330,000 copies on week days and 500,000
on Sundays.

And this is a genuine circulation. There are no
return privileges which permit of subtle distinctions
between the number of papers distributed and the
number sold, nor has the circulation been padded or
inflated by any irregular methods. Some illustrations
of the principles of The Times on this point may
here be offered with apologies to the well-intentioned
friends of the paper with whose ideas the manage-
ment was unable to agree.

One day during the Presidential campaign of 1900
the Republican National Committee happened to
be meeting in New York. That morning The Times

310

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

carried an editorial on the issues of the campaign
which struck the Republican managers as about the
most forcible presentation of the case which they
had seen anywhere. Mr. Luther Little of the Com-
mittee was accordingly instructed to call on the
publisher to express the Committee's thanks and
appreciation and to order one million copies of that
issue for distribution.

To his profound surprise, the publisher of The Times
refused to accept the order. He felt that the wide
free distribution of a marked newspaper might easily
create, in the minds of many who received it, a false
impression to the effect that the appearance of the
article and the purchase of the copies might be in
some way a bargain. The TimeSy of course, would
not receive payment of any sort for what appeared
in its reading columns, and it did not want to incur
even the suspicion. Mr. Little argued, not without
plausibility, that The Times must have printed that
editorial hoping that people would read it, and here
a million more readers were offered. But the pub-
lisher of the paper felt that readers of that sort
would do the paper little good, while the accompany-
ing suspicions would do positive harm.

The conductors of The Times were publishing a
paper for the people who Hked the sort of paper
they were publishing. They did not want it forced
on anybody's attention or given away free because
it contained something which happened to strike
the fancy of gentlemen who were able to order and
distribute a million copies. Circulation of such char-
acter, it was felt, could do the paper no good and
might do a great deal of harm. The only readers

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Times sought were readers who would buy the
paper because they wanted it. They did not wish it
to be classed with the sort of campaign literature
that is distributed free.

A somewhat similar issue arose in the same cam-
paign when the Republican State Committee of
New Jersey wanted to buy 20,000 copies of The
Times every day during the last three months of
the canvass. This proposal also was declined. This
sort of thing had been a commonplace of the polit-
ical journalism of an earlier period. The weekly
editions of such New York newspapers as had strong
partisan sympathies, in the sixties and seventies had
been in campaign years little more than campaign
pamphlets, full of praise of the party's candidates,
violent attacks on the opposition, and argument in
defence of the party's position; and for their circula-
tion in those years they had depended largely on
the party committees, which bought and distributed
many thousands of copies.

This, of course, was in effect a subsidy from the
party to the paper, but according to the journalistic
ethics of past years there was nothing irregular about
accepting it. By 1900 newspaper standards in some
quarters were somewhat higher, but still the action
of the management of The Times surprised a good
many newspaper men, as well as the party managers,
who had supposed that the paper would regard the
proposed arrangement as advantageous to both sides.

The reluctance of The Times was not due simply
to the fact that it was not a Republican paper and
did not want to become identified in any way with
the party leadership. Its conductors felt that The

312

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

Times had no right to accept compensation in any
form for its editorial opinion, even though that com-
pensation was after the fact and the opinion had
been formed without any expectation of it.

This question has been raised several times since
in somewhat different form, and without political
connections. A number of requests have been made
for a considerable number of copies of the paper for
free distribution on account of an article appearing
in the editorial or news columns. Always the re-
quest has been refused, though permission to reprint
articles from The Times for distribution has been
freely granted, on condition that the reprint contain
some statement making it clear that The Times had
no hand in the distribution. It has been the pub-
lisher's opinion that this policy prevented the
growth of mistaken opinions not only outside, but
more particularly within The Times office. He was
seeking the confidence of the public, but he regarded
as still more essential the confidence of those who
were associated with him in making the newspaper.
Mr. Ochs has always felt that he need not be con-
cerned about public opinion with respect to The
Times if its editors believe in his sincere desire for
clean, honest work.

Some years ago a prominent Western manufac-
turer wrote to The Times and ordered the paper sent
daily for a year to fifty clergymen in his town. His
reason was that he regarded The Times as a good
newspaper, in fact, the best newspaper, and he
thought that ministers in a small city of the interior
might have their outlook on the world broadened by
the study of its pages.

313

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Times refused to send the papers to the ad-
dresses he had forwarded. The pubUsher held that
the orders could be filled only if they came with the
knowledge and consent of the recipients, that is, if
they really wanted the paper. The Times was not
to be forced on anybody who had not asked for it,
and it was not to be distributed in quantity by out-
siders, thereby perhaps incurring the suspicion that
it was in some way an organ or a mouthpiece for
the views of the individuals or classes accelerating its
distribution.

More recently the same question was raised by a
banker in South Carolina, who admired The Times
financial news and its editorial discussions of finan-
cial problems. He thought that the bankers of his
state, incHned to be absorbed in their own local
affairs, would be better off for learning something
about world trade and world finance, and, accord-
ingly, ordered The Times sent regularly to 450 of
them at his expense. In this case, again. The Times
could not but regard this as a compHment, and had
no doubt whatever of the correct intentions of the
man who wanted to pay for the papers. But again
the publisher felt that, while it might be good for
South Carolina bankers to read The Times, it was not
good for The Times to be distributed gratis.

The banker who had made the offer still thought
that his colleagues needed education, so when The
Times refused to fill his order he attempted partially
to carry out his purpose through the medium of a
Charleston newsdealer. The sudden increase of 450
copies in this dealer's order at once aroused suspicion
in the oflSce, and when this suspicion was verified

314

JOHN H. FINLEY,

Associate Editor.

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

The Times, although rather gratified by this evidence
of the persistent conviction of the banker that it
was a good paper, refused to fill the order.

It may be addec' that in the belief of the man-
agement these principles are not in conflict with the
action of certain large hotels which see advantage
to themselves in providing each guest in his room
with a copy of The Times every morning.

It can be assumed from these illustrations that
there is nothing artificial about The Times's circu-
lation. Its subscribers are people who desire it, who
want it, and who know why they want it.

Of course, the increase in circulation brought with
it a great increase in advertising. The volume of
advertising pubHshed in 1896 had been more than
quadrupled by 1914, and the rates were several times
increased during this period. The Times has not
been always a single-rate paper in the strictest sense
of the word, but it has always been a single-rate
paper to the extent that everybody paid the same
price for the same service.

The advertising rates have been very slowly ad-
vanced with the greatest consideration for the ad-
vertiser's problem in adjusting his appropriation for
space in The Times to the increased rates. And
whereas the net return to The Times per column in
1896, with a circulation of less than 20,000, was ^45,
in 1921 the rate for a circulation of 340,000 — ■ more
than seventeen times larger — was only ^150.

The management of The Times has always felt
that all good advertising, that is honest advertising,
has a certain news value. It is information for the

31S

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

public, of some interest and advantage to the public.
In discriminating between advertisements, when
limitations of space compelled discrimination, it has
been the policy to give preference so far as possible
to advertising which possessed news interest in a
higher degree.

It is not to be supposed that anybody seriously
believes any longer that The Times is in any way
controlled or influenced in its editorial policies by its
advertisers. Some papers may be so influenced,
though it may be doubted if this could be said of any
important one in New York City. The papers which
are too tender of advertisers' feelings are, naturally,
poor papers, financially poor, which cannot aff'ord to
lose advertising. In recent years The Times has
sometimes been compelled to refuse advertising,
off'ered for insertion in a single day, the total amount
of which would have filled many pages and yielded
perhaps ^20,000, because it did not have room enough
to hold all that was offered; so no sane man is likely
to suppose that its policies are affected by the wishes
of any advertiser.

However, The Times has not always been prosper-
ous. In poverty as in aflfluence, none the less, it has
always held the same principles, and in consequence
it has had a number of disagreements with advertisers
who thought that somehow their business dealings
with The Times gave them the privilege of complain-
ing of its editorial positions, its news pubhcations,
or its business policies.

In one instance, at least, and a rather important
one, in the early history of the present management
twenty years ago, an advertiser came into conflict

316

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

with the paper on a point of advertising policy. A
regular advertiser called the attention of The Times
to the advertisement of a competitor which in his
opinion was so misleading as to be downright fraudu-
lent. Investigation showed that in this particular
case he was right, and the objectionable advertise-
ment was refused thereafter. But the complainant,
not satisfied with this, began to ask some humiliating
promises from the management of The Times with
respect to its policies. The conductors of The Times
were even more anxious than this overzealous ad-
vertiser to keep their columns free from undesirable
matter, but they were unwilling to enter into an
argument with an advertiser about the policies of
the paper. The position taken by the management
of the paper was set forth in the letter given below,
w^hich closed the incident until years later the gentle-
man found it desirable, in the interests of his busi-
ness, to bring his advertising back to The Times
without asking for anything more than space in the
paper.

The publisher of The Times set forth his views in
this letter as follows:

The New York Times

Office of the Publisher

New York, Nov. 21, 1901.

*******

You must excuse me from discussing with
you the policy of The New York Times. It
is a subject we do not care to discuss with
an advertiser. We consider it a privilege to
any one to be permitted to make an an-

317

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

nouncement in the columns of The Times
aside from the fact that our rates for adver-
tising space are far from commensurate with
the service rendered. If The New York
Times as it appears every day is not a suffi-
cient recommendation for the use of its col-
umns by advertisers (such as we will accept),
assurance otherwise would be of little or no
value.

We do not want to sail under false colors.
The New York Times is not published solely
for the purpose of attracting advertisers.
We hope, however, to attract by the number
and the class of our readers. We are seeking
to secure the good-will and confidence of in-
telligent, discriminating newspaper readers.
The advertiser is a secondary consideration.
We take great pride in the knowledge of the
fact that we have succeeded in impressing
the honesty of our efforts upon the largest
number of the best citizens of this city, rep-
resenting both readers and advertisers. Of
course, there are some exceptions. Among
the latter class a conspicuous example is
yourself. You seem to wish that The New
York Times should go about as a mendicant,
begging for advertising patronage. We will
never do anything of the kind and are happy
to say there is no occasion for our doing so.

This all leads to the statement that if your
advertisement remains out of The New York
Times until you have some assurance other
than the paper as it appears every day, as to
the policy of the publisher. The Times, as
long as it is under its present management,
will endeavor to get along without your
business.

*******

318

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

Some of the differences of opinion with the book
publishers have already been told. A later episode,
however, involved something far more serious than
a mere disagreement on the advertising value of
The Times literary supplement; it was, indeed, per-
haps the most formidable attempt ever made by
advertisers to coerce The Times. The Book Pub-
lishers* Association threatened to withdraw, and
then withdrew, all of its members' advertising from
The Times because of the insertion of cut-rate
prices of their books in the advertisement of a
department store.

While admitting that the competition of a depart-
ment store selling certain articles at cut rates offered
some formidable problems to business men dealing
only in these articles, the publisher of The Times had
occasion to ask the publishers how it happened that
the store could get these books. That was a matter
between the book publishers and the store; the
advertising of the dealer's wares was the affair of
the store and The Times, Indeed, the management
of the paper observed that if the fact was not
advertised that books could be purchased at lower
prices than those charged by the publishers, it
would deserve to be given to the readers of The Times
as news.

This concept of a paper's responsibility as being
first of all to its readers rather than to any advertiser
or group of advertisers was somewhat novel to the
book publishers, but they presently found that The
Times could not be moved b}^ the loss of their adver-
tising, and that in fact they were hurting nobody but
themselves. After a few weeks they came back, con-

319

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tent to let the paper run its own business without
further interference and recognizing the wisdom of
The Times^s attitude.

Another heavy advertiser's custom was lost, in
this case forever, through a difference of opinion on
the relative value of advertising and news. This
gentleman had arranged for the publication of what
he considered an important announcement in a half-
page advertisement on June i6, 1904, the morning
after the burning of the excursion steamer General
Slocum, with the loss of more than a thousand lives.
At that time the mechanical facilities of The Times
did not permit the printing of more than sixteen
pages. The advertisement was omitted on the
ground that the space was needed for news and that
the paper's duty to its readers demanded that newr
be given the right of way.

Perhaps the most notable difference with adver-
tisers was a disagreement with one of the largest and
best advertisers in the country, who withdrew his
advertising from The Times because of a personal
grievance, arising out of an incidental publication in
another paper controlled by the publisher of The
Times. This item was mistakenly attributed to the
publisher, and some exacting demands were accord-
ingly made which could not be complied with. Al-
though it involved the loss of more than a million
dollars' worth of the most desirable advertising, the
management of The Times was adamant in its refusal
to make the publication requested. After ten years*
absence the advertiser returned to The Times with-
out any conditions, and good relations w^ere happily
restored.

320

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

It was in a later period, in 191 5, that an attempt
was made to control The Times^s dramatic criticism
by somewhat different methods. A producer con-
ceived the mistaken impression that the chief dra-
matic critic of The Times was prejudiced against his
productions, and in spite of the fact that very few of
the reviews responsible for this impression had been
written by the critic in question, the producer sud-
denly refused to admit him to his theatres. For a
time the critic managed to review the producer's
plays under the protection of an injunction, but this
was presently vacated. While the doors of the
theatres were closed to The Thnes critic, the advertis-
ing columns of The Times were closed to the producer,
and publication of his offered announcements was
refused.

In the legal fight the paper was beaten. It was
developed that while the laws of New York regard
the theatre as a pubHc institution to the extent that
its owner cannot exclude classes or racial groups of
the public, it is sufficiently private to permit him to
keep a man out if he does not like him. The lessee
of a theatre cannot refuse to admit a negro, but he
can refuse to admit a critic, provided the critic is
white. Having no colored critics on its staff. The
Times was compelled to continue to ignore the pro-
ducer as the producer ignored The Times; and after
the ignoring had gone on for several months the pro-
ducer discovered that he was cutting off his nose to
spite his face. Consequently the critic was read-
mitted to the theatre, and the advertising was read-
mitted to The Times. It need hardly be said, however,
that this restoration of peace bv joint resolution did

321

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

not imply any change in the critic's attitude. He
continued to judge these productions, as all other
productions, on their merits as he saw them; and by
that time the producer had cooled off and recog-
nized that his notion that the critic was prejudiced
had no foundation. So that even in this case, when
beaten in the courts, The Times achieved the sub-
stance of victory.

These are old, unhappy far-ofF things. It is now
established and well known that The Times will not
accord special favors to advertisers, nor permit them
improperly to influence its news, editorial or busines
policies; it is so well known that in recent years no-
body has tried it. But it was not so well known in
the past, and the management of the paper sometimes
paid pretty heavily for the retention of its independ-
ence. In this matter, too, however, the conductors
of the paper have always felt that good business and
good morals were identical. If it is morally dishonest
to permit advertisers to dictate the policies of the
paper, it is likewise commercially ruinous in the long
run — at least for a paper such as The Times, There
are readers who can be fooled all the time, but The
Times does not appeal to very many of that class.

The unexpectedly rapid growth of the paper had
very early begun to make it uncomfortable in its
cramped quarters in the old Times Building, and its
conductors presently began to look around for a new
building site. While they were looking they had to
move (in 1904) to temporary new quarters at 41
Park Row, around the corner from the site which
The Times had occupied for forty-six years. The old

322

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

Times Building was still owned by the estate of
George Jones. A difference with it about the
terms of the lease compelled the paper to move, but
it was known that this change was only for a short
time until a new and greater Times Building could
be erected.

The Times Building is a landmark in the history
of the paper no less than in the course of Broadway.
The move uptown was one of Mr. Ochs's intuitions;
and the building which was erected was a monu-
mental piece of architecture, and gave invaluable
publicity to the paper. Its construction involved
some important and interesting engineering problems,
and incidentally it put a heavy strain upon the re-
sources of The Times. But the perilous paths were
traversed successfully without The Times forming
any embarrassing associations or commitments; and
the enterprise required the expenditure of several
millions in cash.

In a history of this character, however, the Times
Building can be given little more than passing men-
tion. The Herald had set the example in moving up-
town from Park Row, but the publisher of The Times
showed an accurate prevision of the direction of
growth of the city's uptown centre by selecting for
his new building the triangle between Broadway,
Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street. What is
now the Times Square district was then a region of
no particular importance or distinction, occupied for
the most part by lodging houses and flats, with some
few hotels and restaurants, mostly second or third
class, scattered among them. Broadway — the
Broadway of tradition — still had its centre of grav-

323

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

ity somewhere between the Flatiron Building and
Herald Square. Yet it was evident that the corner
where the Interborough subway, then under con-
struction, met several surface car lines would become
the pivotal point of transportation distribution when-
ever the subway was opened. The conductors of The
Times were right in their judgment of the future of
the Times Square district, but a very brief experience
was to show that they had fallen far short of foresee-
ing the great development that was coming to The
Times. If they had known in the early years of the
century how the paper was going to grow they would
never have put up the new building on that narrow
plot of ground, which allowed so Httle space on each
floor that The Times had outgrown the building
almost before it was settled in it.

However, the erection of that building offered
serious problems enough. Part of the land was pur-
chased in fee simple from the Subway Realty Com-
pany, part had to be obtained by the purchase of
a long-term lease from Charles Thorley. But the
purchase of the land was only a beginning; the build-
ing had to be erected in a sense straddling the sub-
way, for some of the pillars supporting it are planted
right between the old subway tracks. This called
for a good deal of engineering ability and implied a
good deal of expense; and the construction involved
an endless series of annoyances to the owners of The
Times,

The building cost several hundred thousand dollars
more than was anticipated, as buildings have a way
of doing, and at one time it looked as if, while the
seventeen stories of the building proper could be

324

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

completed, there would be no money left to finish the
tower which gave to the structure its chief architec-
tural distinction. It was suggested to the pubhsher
that he had room enough in the building as it stood,
and that he could finish the tower later. But he felt
that to leave the tower unfinished was only a procla-
mation to the whole town that he had bitten off more
than he could chew. By desperate effort the money
was raised; and the building, the cornerstone of which
had been laid with the collaboration of Bishop Potter
on January i8, 1904, was occupied by the paper on
January i, 1905.

It had cost a great deal of money, and a great deal
of effort to get the money, but it was worth it. It
filled one of the most commanding positions in the
landscape of New York City with a structure ade-
quate in every way. At the time of its construction
it was the tallest structure in town, except the Park
Row Building — and taller than that if extension
beneath the pavement were included. But it was
more than a tall building — it was a beautiful tall
building, and erected in a period when very few archi-
tects had come to realize that a skyscraper could just
as easily be beautiful as v/ell as useful. C. L. W. Eid-
litz and Andrew C. Mackenzie, who designed the
building, had found their inspiration in Giotto's cam-
panile at Florence, and their plans provided not only
for splendid lines but for ornamentation which was
effective — and expensive. It was hard to build and
hard to finance, but it was a magnificent signpost
calHng attention to the paper, at a point which was
soon to become the centre of midtown business and
of the night life of the city. Evervbody in New York

325

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

saw the Times Building when they came into the mid-
town district; it was a standing reminder that the
paper was doing great things.

A still greater advertisement was given to the
paper when in 1904 the Board of Aldermen gave the
name of Times Square to the previously nameless
open space between Forty-third and Forty-seventh
Streets at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and
Broadway. Some name was needed, for the subway
had two stations on Forty-second Street and had to
differentiate between them somehow; and the pre-
cedent already set by the naming of Herald Square
led the city authorities and the owners of the subway
to agree that this new centre of the city's life deserved
to be named for the paper which was doing so much
to develop the neighborhood and contributing an
architectural monument to the city. Naturally, this
change passed unnoted by the other morning news-
papers, most of which to this day ignore the fact in
the geography of New York City which is obvious
to anybody who has ever been in the neighborhood
and prefer the name of Longacre Square, which never
had any official standing. It was a local designation
like San Juan Hill, owing its origin to the fact that
some carriage builders who formerly had shops on the
square named it after the London Street where
carriage factories predominate.

As an advertisement it is believed that the Times
Building has been worth every cent it cost, and more,
besides the reward that comes from the conscious-
ness that Its erection, in that place and at that
time, was a oublic service. Times Square fulfilled

326

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

all the expectations which the management of the
paper had entertained when selecting it as the location
of the paper's new home. It became and has remained
the pivotal centre of the city and is the hub of its
transportation systems.

But the conductors of The Times, accurately esti-
mating the future development of New York, had
far underestimated their own future. The paper
grew so fast that the Times Building was soon cramp-
ing it. The next move was to a site as near as possible
to Times Square, to the structure known as the Times
Annex. This building, of 147 feet front, at 217-229
West Forty-third Street, was designed by Mortimer
J. Fox, and if not so architecturally ambitious as the
Times Building, was considerably more extensive.
When virtually all departments of the paper were
moved into it, on February 2, 1913, it was the larg-
est, finest and most completely equipped newspaper
home in North America. It is probably architectur-
ally unsurpassed by any newspaper building in the
world, except the magnificent structure which houses
La Prensa at Buenos Aires. But, though it was
planned on such a large scale that when the paper first
moved in, five of its thirteen floors had been set
aside as a reserve for growth — though the men who
had had to move twice in ten years thought that this
time they would make sure of allowing room for all
the expansion likely to be needed in many years to
come — after eight years this building is already far
too small, and some departments of The Times have
overflowed into temporary quarters in five recon-
structed apartment houses next door, which The
Times has purchased anticipating further growth,

327

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

while those that remain are beginning to be cramped
and crowded.

The years before the war and the early months of
the war saw the estabhshment of some subsidiary
publications of The New York Times Company
which in effect cover more fully certain outlying
fringes of the newspaper field which had previously
been handled by the newspaper itself. The weekly
financial review was in January, 191 3, raised to the
dignity of an independent magazine, The Annalist,
appearing every Monday, dealing with commerce,
economics, and finance. After eight years it has a
larger circulation than any other magazine in its
field.

In April of the same year the paper for the first
time began the publication of The Nezo York Times
Index, which from that time on was much more com-
plete than it had ever been before, and which, pub-
lished quarterly in convenient form, provided a
chronological guide to the news which has become
absolutely indispensable to students of contemporary
history, and is a useful index, as to dates, for any
American morning newspaper.

The war caused the production, in August, 1914,
of The Current History Magazine, which began as a
mere repository for long articles on the war, some of
them reprinted from The Times and others too ex-
tensive for publication in a newspaper. But as it
developed it became a sort of reservoir of documen-
tary exhibits on current history, and in its present
form it includes a review of the month's news from
every country in the world, comments descriptive,

328

SOME ASPECTS OF BUSINESS POLICY

explanatory, or apologetic on the news by experts or
by partisan pleaders (and both kinds have their use),
and finally a collection of original records and docu-
ments which make it perhaps the most valuable of
periodical source books.

A great development in pictorial illustration was
made possible by the introduction in April, 1914, of
the rotogravure presses. A German newspaper con-
taining pictures printed by this process, then un-
known in America, came by chance to The Times
some months before that, and the management was
at once struck by the fact that this method made
possible much better reproductions of photographs
than any then in use. A special trip to Germany re-
sulted in the purchase of rotogravure presses and
their installation in The Times office. The superiority
of the pictorial supplement printed by this process
was so apparent that other papers soon followed
The Times^s example. The Times, however, which
was the first in the field, developed a greater interest
in pictorial illustrations than it had had before that
time. The paper has never done much in the way
of printing photographs in its news section on ordi-
nary newsprint paper, and consequently had never
needed the staff photographers who were so im-
portant a part of other newspaper organizations.
But the rotogravure presses not only gave the con-
ductors of The Times a greater interest in the Sunday
pictorial supplement; they made possible the estab-
lishment of a new and independent publication of
The New York Times Company, The Mid-week
Pictorial, first issued in September, 1914. This, like
The Current History Magazine, began as a war publi-

329

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

cation and has survived the war as a pictorial weekly
newspaper. To serve the increasing needs of the
Sunday and mid-week pictorials The Times Wide-
world Photo Service was organized in 191 9, under
the direction of Charles M. Graves, and already has
some notable feats to its credit.

In at least one use of the rotogravure presses The
Times is still without competition. The Annalist and
The Times Sunday Book Review and Magazine are
now printed by this process, which makes possible an
excellence of typography otherwise unattainable in
such publications, and a fineness and fidehty in the
reproduction of photographs which had never pre-
viously been achieved in any newspaper supplement.

330

THE TIMES BUILDING,
ILLUMINATED FOR VICTORY

@ Brown Bios.

CHAPTER V

The Times in the War, 1914-1918

^ I ^0 the biggest news story of modern times the
■*■ American press as a whole reacted in a manner
highly creditable. It would almost be safe to say
that there was not a single newspaper in the country
which was not a better paper, from the technical
point of view, at the end of the war than at its begin-
ning. That is to say, its editors knew more about
what news was, how to get it, and how to present it
to their readers. Also, the great majority responded
honorably to the secondary but sometimes highly
important duty of interpreting and clarifying the
news by editorial comment. Most of the influential
papers of the country understood at the outset at
least the general causes of the war, and were able to
assess rightly the responsibility for its outbreak.

In general, the service of The Times during the
war consisted in its doing what the other papers, or
most of the other respectable papers, did, but doing
it better. The merit of its war news is sufl[iciently
well known. It was thanks chiefly to the excellence
and the universal scope of its news service that the
circulation of the paper, which was about 250,000
at the beginning of the war, had risen to some 390,000
at its close. But it should not be forgotten that
The Times in editorial analysis of the causes of the
war was amazingly accurate from the very outset,

331

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

so accurate that it brought down on itself almost
at once the wrath of the Germans and their sym-
pathizers, and within a few months had earned the
honorable distinction of being the principal focus of
the vituperation which the Germans and pro-Ger-
mans fired at an unsympathetic American press.

The news department of a paper should not be,
and that of The Times is not, influenced by editorial
policies. But it is sometimes forgotten by amateur
critics of journalism that the editorial page has a
function going somewhat beyond the mere assertion
of opinion. It is often the duty of the editorial
writers to interpret the news, to discriminate be-
tween the probable and the improbable, the ten-
dentious and the more or less impartial, in the great
volume of news reports which come to the office.
Since human nature is fallible, it has been found
advisable to print all the news and leave to the
editorial page the assessment of its relative worth,
rather than exercise discrimination at the news desk
and suppress everything that fails to ' accord with
the news editor's judgment of the probabilities.

The general reader may disagree with the
editorial interpretation. That is his privilege, for
it is presented only as an interpretation. But
editorial writers are somewhat better informed than
the average reader. They probably know more of
the news than he does, for they read half a dozen
papers a day where he reads one or two; a newspaper
prints all the news it gets, so long as that news is not
libelous, but a single paper does not always get it
all. But the editorial writers have read much out-
side of the daily papers; they have a background

332

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

of solid information which enables them to under-
stand a good deal that is dark to the man in the
street. Elucidation based on wider and more thorough
knowledge is probably the most important function
of the editorial page today.

There has rarely been a better example of the
performance of this function than The Times's edi-
torials on the outbreak of the war. Information
available then was far from complete; it consisted
only of vague and scanty official statements on the
diplomatic exchanges. The accounts of the secret
conferences in which every Government of Europe
was going over the situation in the last week of
July, 1914, as well as the story of much of the actual
diplomatic negotiation, did not come to public
knowledge till much later. But after the lapse of
seven years, despite all the voluminous publication
of secret archives which since the armistice has in-
formed the world of what went on behind the scenes
in those days, there is not one line of The Times
editorial analysis of the responsibility for the war,
written in the days when the war was being made,
which would have to be retracted today.

The Times, to be sure, like all the world, was slow
to believe that the conflict that had been so long
expected that it had come to seem impossible was at
last at hand. It held the same hope that everybody
held in the summer of 1914 in the moderating influ-
ence of financiers and business men, and above all it
believed, until belief was no longer possible, that the
German Emperor had the will to avert the war as
he undoubtedly had the power. But the events
of the week leading up to the declaration of war

333

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

convinced The Times that Austria was responsible
for the war in the sense that the criminal recklessness
of Austrian statesmen had deliberately provoked
it, and that Germany was responsible in that if the
Kaiser had forbidden it there would have been no
war.

On July 27, 1914, when Austria had refused to
accept the Serbian reply to the ultimatum and had
stood out before the world as plainly determined to
fight, The Times said in an editorial article:

It will be freely said that Count Berchtold
has seized what seemed to him a most
propitious moment for dealing a blow at
Pan-Slavism and strengthening Pan-Ger-
manism, and incidentally reviving the Ger-
man party in Austria. . . . The only
hope of peace seems to be in the awakening
of the German conscience.

Four days later, when it was evident that the
German conscience either had not awakened or was
unable to affect the consciences of the rulers of
Germany, The Times observed :

Now is the very best of all times for tak-
mg account of the frightful wrong involved in
governmental systems which permit great
and prosperous peoples to be dragged into
the war without consulting their will and
their welfare.

On August 2 The Times pronounced the famous
speech of the German Emperor about the sword
which had been forced into his hand **a piece of
pompous humbug," and after deploring the fact
that evidently some European peoples, even those

334

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

which had been regarded as highly cultured, were
no more than a dumb herd which could be driven,
physically and psychologically, where the leaders
willed, went on to say that

there is a possibility, historically justified,
that a general European war would be fol-
lowed by changes which would make the
herd vocal.

Four days later it resumed this same argument, go-
ing so far as to make the prediction, later sustained
in every particular, that the war was very Hkely to
result in revolution in Russia, revolution in Germany
and the break-up of Austria-Hungary.

Again, on August 6 The Times observed that while
every nation going into the war found plenty of
excuse for justifying its course of action,

the historian will have no trouble in plac-
ing his finger on the cause of the war, and
there are men in Vienna today whose de-
scendants for many generations will redden
at the verdict.

The peculiar German mind was of course not so
well understood in those days. It takes a good deal
to make the average German redden, even today, as
the trials of war offenders at Leipzig showed. Never-
theless, even the Germans are Hkely to accept the
truth of this judgment in time; the rest of the world
has already ratified it. But in the summer of 1914
it did not command universal acceptance, even
though the majority of Americans thought Germany
in the wrong. The chief public service of The Times
in the war was that from the very beginning it

335

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

understood where the rights and wrongs of the
conflict lay, it was able to justify its position by
sound argument, and it never ceased to maintain
that position with all the vigor which its editors
were able to command. The furious hostility
toward the paper which the Germans and their
sympathizers soon displayed is the best measure
of its success in performing this duty.

However, there was an equally important duty
to be performed in giving to the public every bit of
information as to the underlying causes, as well as
the immediate occasion, of this vast and multiplex
conflict. It is not too much to say that before the
war had been going on three months The Times had
become the principal forum for debate on the issues
of the war. Despite the fact that its editors were
firmly convinced that Germany was in the wrong,
The Times realized the necessity of hearing every-
thing that could be said on both sides. As was said
on the editorial page a few months after the war
began, "access to its columns has been denied to no
German sympathizer, if reputable, responsible and
literate." Some of them, indeed, were neither repu-
table nor responsible, but if they seemed to have
anything of value to contribute to the discussion
The Times heard them.

The principal item in this discussion was unques-
tionably the publication in full of the arguments of
the various European Governments — the White
Papers, Yellow Books, Orange Papers and so on, con-
sisting of the diplomatic correspondence leading up
to the outbreak of the war, or as much of it as the
several governments were inclined to give out to the

33^

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

public. Long extracts from these were, of course,
sent to The Times by cable as soon as they were
issued, but it seemed to The Times that the im-
portance of the issue made it imperative to present
the whole case, or as much of it as the governments
themselves had given out.

The first copy of the British White Paper was
brought to this country at the end of August, 1914,
by the Rev. Dr. Frederick Lynch, who had received
it in advance of publication from an official friend
just as he was boarding his steamer at Liverpool.
He gave it to a Times reporter, and it was published
in full on the following Sunday. The presses were
still printing it when, in the small hours of Sunday
morning, Frederic William Wile, Berlin correspondent
of The Times, arrived with a copy of the German
White Paper. A corps of translators was set to
work at 2 a.m.; by 10 o'clock Sunday evening they
had finished their task, and the document was
printed in full in Monday morning's Times, Thus
early in the war The Times presented to its readers
on two successive days all that was obtainable from
official sources on both sides of the case. The two
documents were reprinted in pamphlet form and
distributed at cost to some hundreds of thousands
of eager readers throughout the United States and
Canada.

After the British and German statements came
the official documents of the French, Russian,
Austrian and Belgian governments, giving to the
world what each saw fit to publish of its diplomatic
records, and having set the precedent The Times
pubHshed them all, in full. Again they were repub-

337

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

lished in tabloid form, and before the end of 1914
The Times was in effect running an extension uni-
versity on the issues of the war. At that time its war
news was on the whole about the same as the war
news of other papers, so far as related to the actual
fighting; but from the very start it surpassed all
its competitors in giving the news about the reasons
for the war.

Here was the official brief of each government;
it seemed to the management of The Times that the
next thing was argument from the briefs. An at-
tempt was made to have eminent American lawyers
discuss the White Papers as attorneys for the two
governments, but this proved to be impossible for
the somewhat significant reason that the three or
four American lawyers known to be sympathetic
with Germany, or inclined to entire neutrality, who
were asked to present the German side of the argu-
ment refused to argue the German case if they were
restricted to the evidence put forward in these
official documents. Clearly they were able to
realize that the German White Paper presented a
pretty poor case. When it proved impossible to
present this debate, the publisher of The Times
finally persuaded James M. Beck to analyze alone all
the arguments, not as a representative of either side,
but as an impartial reviewer.

Mr. Beck was a former Assistant Attorney General
of the United States and was one of the leaders of
the New York bar, but his discussion of the case pre-
sented by the White Papers before *'the supreme
court of civilization'* made him internationally
famous. Arguing from the briefs presented by the

338

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THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

several governments, he reached the conclusion that
Germany was in the wrong, and supported his opin-
ion by an able and searching analysis. First pre-
sented in The Times of Sunday, October 25, 1914,
his articles were reprinted in pamphlet form under
the title of *'The Evidence in the Case/' by several
governments, notably the English, and millions of
copies distributed over the world in many languages.
Extracts and summaries of his argument were
published the w^orld over, and gave to millions of
readers the foundation for opinions which had been
somewhat confused by the volume and the obscurity
of the official documents.

Second only in importance to the White Papers
and their like were the innumerable arguments con-
ducted in the columns of The Times by sympathizers
of the two sides. All papers had their share of such
discussions, of course, but The Times had more of
them, and of more distinguished authorship. Nota-
ble among these were the letters exchanged between
Charles W. Eliot and Jacob H. SchifF, published in
The Times in December, 191 4; the arguments pre-
sented by G. K. Chesterton and various other
British authors on the side of the Allies, and those of
Dr. Bernhard Dernburg, Arthur von Briesen, Pro-
fessor William Milligan Sloane and Professor John
W. Burgess on the German side. Throughout most
of the war military experts, usually officers either
active or retired of the United States Army, analyzed
each day the military operations from the technical
standpoint. German sympathizers in the fall of
1914 complained that the military critic showed too
much partisanship for the Allies, so for some months

339

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Times published frequent comments on the
military situation by a former officer of the German
Army.

All these discussions, of course, took place either
on the editorial page or in the Sunday magazine,
and were supplementary to the voluminous argu-
ments which were part of the news of the day. There
were in addition a number of important contributions
on the war as affecting purely American interests, of
which the most notable were a series by Theodore
Roosevelt in the fall of 1914 on "What America
Should Learn From the War, " the articles contrib-
uted toward the end of 191 6 by a publicist who
concealed his identity under the signature of "Cos-
mos," and the later series signed by "An American
Jurist," who, as has since been announced, was
Robert Ludlow Fowler, Surrogate of New York
County and one of the most accomplished scholars
on the bench. In quieter times Judge Fowler's series
of brilliantly written articles would have been
generally accepted as something of a classic.

Of course, partisans of each side were often indig-
nant that any space should be given to the other
side; and because the Germans were Germans their
indignation was most violent, and most inclined to
the imputation of base motives. Before the war
was two months old a group of more or less authentic
Americans in Munich saw fit to send to the German
press a protest against the '* prejudiced and unfair''
attitude of The Times, which was duly sent abroad
by the industrious German wireless. Before long
the most notorious German propagandists in America
were accusing The Times of suppression of news, and

340

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

beginning that vast campaign of calumny which
was taken up by the SociaHsts and Sinn Feiners
when prudential motives imposed silence on the
Germans, later in the war, and joyfully resumed
by the whole crew when they came out of their holes
after the armistice. Every honest and patriotic
American newspaper was the target of these attacks;
the assertion that the whole American press had
been bought by British gold seemed reasonable
enough to persons who were unfamiliar with the
idea of any but a purchased press; and these accusa-
tions against any paper were only proof that that
paper was honestly and fearlessly doing its duty.
But The Times was probably honored by more
denunciation than any other paper in the country,
though The World and The Tribune were close
behind it in this honorable competition. Fortu-
nately, the American people were making up their
minds, and most of them knew exactly what all this
Teutonic clamor was worth.

However, not all the criticism came from one
side. Just as half a century before some superheated
northern patriots had accused The Times of sym-
pathy with secession because it had a correspondent
who sent the news from Charleston, so in the World
War some sympathizers with the Allies could see
nothing but sympathy with Germany in any in-
cHnation to give the Germans a hearing. In Novem-
ber, 1 91 4, for instance, a reverend clergyman wrote to
The Times that he couldn't stand ''such dishes of
German arrogance and insolence as you are serving
daily to your readers." His emotional reaction was
wholly creditable, but he and some others Hke him

341

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

forgot that it was highly important that the Ameri-
can people should learn what the Germans really
were and learn it by the most convincing and con-
victing evidence, that which proceeded out of their
own mouths.

It is possible that in the early months of the war
The Times gave up nearly as much space to German
arguments as to those of the opposition, for the
Germans saw from the first that the balance of
opinion was against them, and they made desperate
efforts in their tactful way to turn the scales. These
arguments were apt to be convincing, but in the
opposite direction; and, anyway, the actions of the
Germans always spoke louder than their words.
Even before the Lusitania^ the Germans had realized
that their cause before American public opinion was
lost, and had already begun to supplement their
arguments and persuasions with sabotage and vio-
lence. What part the editorial columns of The Times
may have had in the formation of American pubHc
opinion can best be determined by those outside the
office, but attention may be called to one editorial,
one of the most forceful and important which has
ever appeared in The Times, which deserves special
mention as an example of historical and political
insight. This article, two columns in length, was
written by Charles R. Miller, the editor in chief, and
appeared on December 15, 1914. It was headed
'*For the German People, Peace with Freedom."

That editorial began with the flat statement,
'* Germany is doomed to sure defeat." It analyzed
the military situation, the probabilities of the future;

342

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

but its argument was founded chiefly on moral
considerations, on the beHef that the world would
not let Germany win; that a German victory meant
the negation of all human progress, and that every
free people, if forced to the issue, would find itself
compelled to resist the German attack on civiliza-
tion. "Yet," the article continued, '*the downfall
of the German Empire may become the deliverance
of the German people, if they will betimes but seize
and hold their own." And then it analyzed the
situation of the German people, paying all the
cost of the war, sure to endure the consequence of
defeat, yet unable to win anything from victory in
a conflict which they had undertaken at the com-
mand of their rulers and whose issues, even if success-
ful, would profit those rulers alone.

''If," the article continued, ''Germany chooses to
fight to the bitter end, her ultimate and sure over-
throw will leave her bled to exhaustion, drained of
her resources, and under sentence to penalties of
which the stubbornness of her futile resistance will
measure the severity. We could wish that the Ger-
man people, seeing the light, might take timely
measure to avert the calamities that await them."

The article created a sensation. It was repub-
lished and commented on throughout the world,
and is generally regarded as one of the greatest
editorials ever appearing in an American newspaper.
It is reproduced in full in an appendix to this volume.

This analysis of the issue raised by German
aggression, of the relations between the German
masses and the oligarchy that ruled them, of the
only possible escape for the Germans and the

343

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

inevitable consequences of refusal to take that way
of escape, was justified in every detail by the
history of the next four years. Some two years
and four months later the President of the United
States came around to these opinions, which he
expressed in his speech of April 2, 1917; and a year
and seven months after that the German people were
at last convinced of the soundness of this reasoning,
by the only argument they were able to understand
— and, unfortunately, too late to be able to escape
the penalties of delay.

This editorial may stand as a summary of The
Times^s position on the war, so far as it was purely a
European war. New issues were raised in the spring
of 191 5, both by the sinking of the Lusitania and by
Germany's transference of the war, so far as possible,
to American soil; but before that had happened The
Times had recognized German aggression as a
menace to the whole world, and though continuing
to publish all the arguments on the German side, was
using all its influence to convince the American
people that the world could not let Germany win
the war. As has been said, the German propagan-
dists and their American sympathizers already looked
on The Times as their chief antagonist, and were
flinging at it every accusation, old and new, which
their active imaginations could devise. To most of
the readers of the paper these charges were evidently
only a satisfying proof that the Germans felt that
The Times was dangerous. But a good deal can be
forgotten in three or four years, and already memory
of the ways of German propagandists before 191 7 is

344

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

fading, as well as the recollection of the influence
which they had, for a considerable time, in circles
where they should have been better understood.

The culmination of these attacks upon The Times
came in March, 191 5 — not in a meeting of German
singing societies or the Clan-na-Gael, but in a hearing
before a committee of the United States Senate,
where all the enmity that had been aroused by
The Times^s criticisms of impromptu statesmanship
flared into open view, and all the calumnious whispers
that had been spread abroad by persons unable to
imagine that any man or any newspaper could
advocate any opinions except for a cash considera-
tion were dignified by the attention of eminent
Senators.

This episode deserves extended notice, for it is
important not only in the history of The Times but
in the history of modern journalism; perhaps, even,
it has some interest as an illustration of recent
tendencies in the United States Senate. Because
the editors of The Times had expressed their opinions
on some questions of pubHc policy, opinions not
altogether in agreement with those of the Senators
on the committee, they were summoned to Wash-
ington and asked if anybody was paying them for
those opinions, and if so, who. The pretext for
this inquisition — in view of the course taken by
the committee, it can hardly be called anything else
— was The Times^s 'opposition to the administration
bill for the purchase of foreign ships interned in
American harbors. The paper opposed this because
it opposed the intrusion of the government into
business, and because it had its doubts whether the

345

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

purchase in time of war of ships interned to escape
capture by the enemy was vaHd in international
law. There was much, and reasonable, opposition
to this measure; The Times had no monopoly of its
opinion. But the Senate appointed a committee to
inquire 'Sf influence had been exerted" against the
bill. The possibility that there might be room for
two honest opinions on the subject did not seem to
occur to the Senators.

However, this suspicion, if not very creditable to
the collective intelligence of the Senate, was at least
more legitimate than some of the innuendoes with
which the members of the committee decorated the
sessions devoted to questioning editors of The Times.
For the information of the Senators, who displayed
a great deal of curiosity about the ownership of The
Times, the managing editor furnished not only the
list of all persons owning more than one per cent of
the capital stock, which was published anyway twice
a year, but a table showing how much each one of
them owmed. The discovery that the publisher of
The Times owned 62 per cent of the stock, that its
editor owned something more than 14 per cent, and
that nearly half the residue was owned by other per-
sons who had no occupation excepting contributing
their bit toward getting out The Times, was ap-
parently something of a disappointment to the
committee; but the Senators still had a good many
questions to ask.

The next session of the committee, in which the
editor-in-chief was examined, began very much in
the form of a class in elementary journalism. The
Ship Purchase bill was forgotten; Senators asked

346

THETSyES

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lilHMMMliMiiMKaeiM

MAIN ENTRANCE TIMES BUILDING.

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

Mr. Miller why The Times opposed parcel posts; wh}^
it thought this and that about the railroads and
about the trust prosecutions; why certain stories
were not put on the front page. The Times by that
time was virtually on trial for all its opinions, and
its editor no doubt experienced some weariness as he
laboriously explained that the editors of a news-
paper advocate certain policies because they believe
them best for the public interest, that not all the
news can be put on the front page, that the relative
value of different news stories is a matter of judg-
ment and that the judgment of all newspapers is not
always identical.

Having got through this, however, the committee
took up another line of argument. Senator T. J.
Walsh of Montana, its Chairman, asked if The Times
had **^any business connections of any character in
England.** Mr. Miller said that it had none aside
from maintaining its own correspondents there.
Then Senator Walsh wanted to know if Mr. Ochs
had "any financial support of any kind in England."
Mr. Miller said that he had none whatever, where-
upon Senator Walsh explained, rather apologetically,
"I asked because I was informed that that was the
case.

Mr. Miller's denial was made still more emphatic
by an editorial next day, on March 17, which con-
tained this statement:

That there may be no cause to believe
that Mr. Miller's answer to the impertinent
inquiry about Mr. Ochs's private affairs
does not fully and satisfactorily end the in-
quiry, Mr. Ochs wishes to make the asser-

347

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tion as broad and sweeping as language will
permit that he is in possession, free and un-
incumbered, of the controlling and major-
ity interest of the stock of The New York
Times Company, and has no associate in
that possession, and is not beholden or ac-
countable to any person or interest in Eng-
land or anywhere else in the world, nor has
he ever been beholden or accountable in
any form, shape or fashion, financial or
otherwise, for the conduct of The New York
Times, except to his own conscience and to
the respect and confidence of the news-
paper-reading public, and particularly the
readers of The New York Times — and
more particularly to the respect and confi-
dence of those who are associated with him
in producing The New York Times and ex-
pressing its opinions.

The conductors of The Times could say no more
on the question of English ownership, but they still
had something to say about Senator ThdJitats^J.
Walsh, who "had been informed that that was the
case." Who had informed him? The Times asked
this question, rather insistently, and bit by bit the
truth came out. Just before that session of the
committee opened there had come a letter, addressed
to "The Hon. Chairman," signed by a name which
Senator Walsh read as "Arthur M. Abbey." The
writer said that he had just come back from Eng-
land, where he had heard at the Junior Constitu-
tional Club in London that "a well-known EngHsh-
man has been backing Mr. Ochs with money to get
control of The New York Times,''' and that "I un-
derstand that Mr. Miller is also mixed up in some

348

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

way with this Englishman." So that nobody would
go astray, the writer added, **the name of Lord
NorthcHffe was mentioned," and he threw in for
good measure that **Mr. Ochs has also been mixed
up in the EngHsh Marconi scandal."

The Times again denied each and every one of
these charges and asked for more information about
'* Arthur M. Abbey." Who was he.? What did Sen-
ator Walsh know about him, that he regarded his
communication as sufficiently important to spread
on the record of a Senate committee the suggestion
that The Times was controlled by foreigners? At
the Junior Constitutional Club in London he was
unknown; and it presently appeared that he was
equally unknown to Senator Walsh. The Senator
finally sent The Times the original letter, and in
the office the handwriting and style were soon rec-
ognized as identical with those of a whole series of
scurrilous letters which had been coming regularly
to The Times office from New York — and not from
London. Of the hardly legible signatures to these
letters some seemed to resemble '*G. M. Hubbell"
and others ''A. M. Abbey"; some of the letters were
not signed at all. But they were all abusive, all
plainly the w^ork of one writer, and all the work of
the same man who had informed Senator Walsh
that ''such was the case."

No doubt this spreading of the facts upon the rec-
ord did something to weaken the legend of British
ownership of The Times. This fiction continued to
be one of the staples of German, Irish and SociaHst
argument; but it is significant that the next attack
made on The Times from a source pretending to

349

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

reputability, more than five years later, began with
the rejection of all suspicion of outside influence and
developed the entertaining theory that the editors
of The Times were simply constitutionally incapable
of understanding the truth. It was admitted that
they, like all men, needs must love the highest when
they see it, but it was argued that they were pretty
poor judges of altitude. Perhaps not all enemies of
the paper are so generous, but belief in the North-
clifFe ownership has in general been confined, in recent
years, to circles where it is still asserted that Presi-
dent Wilson was owned by Wall Street and that
Germany fought a defensive war.

However, the chief importance of this incident
does not lie in its bearing on the reputation of The
Times, As was said in the paper's editorial columns
at the time:

This is not a personal issue. It is a ques-
tion of the extent to which a government's
machinery may be privately misused to an-
noy and attempt to discredit a newspaper
whose editorial attitude has become dis-
tasteful and embarrassing.

And it was in the name, not of The Times, but of
the whole American press — a press which for nearly
two centuries had been free from governmental con-
trol — that Mr. Miller, at the close of his interro-
gation by the committee on The Times^s editorial
attitude toward every subject of public interest, ad-
dressed some remarks to the committee:

I can see no ethical, moral or legal right
[he said] that you have to put many of the
questions you put to me today. Inquisi-

350

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

torial proceedings of this kind v/ould have
a very marked tendency, if continued and
adopted as a poHcy, to reduce the press of
the United States to the level of the press
in some of the Central European empires,
the press that has been known as the rep-
tile press, that crawls on its belly every day
to the Foreign Office or to the Government
officials and Ministers to know what it may
say or shall say — to receive its orders.

Questions of that kind, he said, **tend to repress
freedom of utterance and to put newspapers under
a sort of duress." Nor was it to be supposed that
newspapers would be free from all restraint if a
Senatorial committee did not now and then turn
aside to give publicity to the commonplaces of Ger-
man propaganda. '*We appear before the jury
every day," said Mr. Miller.

We appear before the grand inquisition,
one of the largest courts in history; we are
judged at the breakfast table. We feel that,
if we were improperly influenced by anybody
outside of the office, there is none so quick
to discover that as the reader of the paper.

That The Times, in this case, was fighting for the
freedom of the entire American press was pretty
generally recognized. There was much editorial
comment on Mr. Miller's statement and on the
committee's procedure. The World called the ques-
tions **a pubhc inquisition without an open arraign-
ment"; The Baltimore American said that the hear-
ing was ''the most extraordinary exhibition of bad
judgment, peevishness or evil motives the country
has had from a Senate committee for years."

351

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Bad judgment and peevishness, no doubt, had
more to do with it than evil motives. For more than
a year thereafter Congress, a timorous body at best,
was extraordinarily sensitive to the compulsions of
bough t-and-paid-for German propaganda, as witness
the Gore and McLemore resolutions. Only very
slowly, in response to the obvious feeling of the
country, and under the leadership of a few men of
patriotism and courage, did Congress gradually re-
cover the hardihood to call its soul its own. The
chief criticism against this particular committee is
that it was willing to believe, and to give currency
to, anything it heard from anybody, anonymous or
otherwise.

No doubt the Senators took a certain very human
joy in getting newspaper editors up before them and
putting them through a third degree; no doubt they
felt entirely justified by the argument that news-
paper editors often criticise Senators. But no news-
paper ever accused a Senator of selling his soul to
foreigners, on no better evidence than an anony-
mous letter.

From the sinking of the Lusitania the war became
a domestic issue. On that issue The Times consist-
ently supported President Wilson. The election of
1916 proved that the President had judged public
sentiment pretty well. There will always be room
for argument as to how the country would have re-
sponded if the Lusitania issue had led to war in the
spring of 191 5. But it should be remembered that
the President's middle-of-the-road policy was being
assailed from two sides, as too pusillanimous and as

352

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

too aggressive. The Times stood with the President
against those who for one reason or another thought
that the Lusitania incident ought to be passed over
in silence, in the full confidence that he would not
be unduly precipitate, but would not yield on essen-
tial issues of American rights.

It was theopinion of The Times that in the spring
of 191 5 the American public, as a whole, was not
ready to fight over the Lusitania, Whatever may
have been the effect of the German arguments based
on the fact that the ship carried some ammunition
in her cargo, and that the passengers had been
warned, it was not believed by the conductors of
The Times that the mass of the people, particularly
in the West and in the rural districts, had as yet
sufficiently appreciated the fundamental issues of
the w^ar to make them willing to fight Germany. It
was doubted if Congress could be persuaded to de-
clare war, and, even if it could have been, the con-
ductors of The Times felt that the division of pub-
lic sentiment, and the evidently lukewarm feeling
of a good part of the public, would have given much
aid and comfort to the enemy. Besides, America
was notably unprepared for war in the spring of
191 5. By 1917 great war industries had been built
up, and two years of prosperity had given the na-
tion financial and industrial strength which made
its intervention decisive. These conditions were not
present when the Lusitania was sunk, and The Times
felt that the President should be supported in his
efforts to preserve peace, so long as that was honor-
ably possible.

It took nearly two years more of the demonstra-
353

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tion of German methods to convince the majority
that America could not honorably and safely keep
out of the war. Through those years The Times
supported the President, holding, as he did, that
there must be, after the war, some sort of world or-
ganization which should, in so far as possible, pre-
vent this thing from happening again. The Times
had opinions far more decided than the President's
on the need for a righteous settlement of this war as
a foundation for any durable peace, and by 191 7 the
President had got around to this view. The little
evidence available suggests that the editors of The
Times had perhaps a more logical interpretation of
the President's position in 191 5 and 1916 than he
had himself; but from 1917 on, at any rate, there
was rarely occasion for disagreement. Perhaps one
exception should be made to this. In the winter of
1917-18 The Tm^fj-, though it did not exactly support
Senator Chamberlain against the President, sup-
ported the substance of Chamberlain's views that
more energy was needed in the executive depart-
ments if the war was to be won.

The Times realized, however, what a good many
even of the friendly critics of the Wilson adminis-
tration forgot in those days, that public officials are
human beings and have to be accepted more or less
as they are, failings and all. Its editors believed
not only that President Wilson was a trustworthy
and able leader, but that he was on the whole more
trustworthy and more able than any other man in
sight. Above all, he was President, he was the head
of the State, the nation's leader; and in war times
it is the duty of every citizen to support the leader.

354

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THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

Mr. Wilson had a way of doing more seasonably,
better and more efficiently than they ever dreamed
of, the things his critics blamed him savagely for not
doing. His injustice to Chamberlain in the begin-
ning of 1 91 8, like his desertion of Garrison in the
beginning of 191 6, might create a very bad impres-
sion; but it did not prove that in the long run either
Chamberlain or Garrison could have done better
than Wilson, even had they been in a position to try.
During 191 8 The Times editorial page, continuing
its general policies on the war and support of the
administration, opened up one or two special lines
of discussion. It gave rather more room than other
papers to consideration of the political readjust-
ments in Europe that might be expected to follow
the end of the war, and to presentation of the claims
and possibilities of the various nationalistic revolu-
tionary movements. It took, too, the most promi-
nent place in denunciation of the behavior of the
Russian Bolsheviki. It is sometimes forgotten that
the Bolshevist revolution in Russia first affected the
world as a phase of the war. Western Europe and
America might have afforded to stand off and watch
the Bolsheviki reconstruct society, if they had not
begun by destroying the eastern front and releasing
hundreds of thousands of German troops for service
in France, and if they had not at once begun to talk
of promoting revolutions in the countries fighting
Germany. To be sure, they were going to start a
revolution in Germany as well, but Brest-Litovsk
showed how little they could or would accomplish
against the German military group. In Germany,
as in Russia, they began their revolution only after

355

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the imperial power had been broken by a less rad-
ical revolution; and in Germany only after the way
had been prepared by Foch's armies.

So when The Times argued, as it did with vigor
and persistence in 191 8, for the sending of alHed
troops to Siberia, it was chiefly in the hope that
they might get through to reestablish an eastern
front. For Bolshevism as a political and economic
gospel The Times had no use, but it regarded this
aspect of the movement as less important than Bol-
shevism as a practical factor in a war whose decision
was still in doubt.

Toward the end of the war occurred an incident
which brought The Times more criticism, probably
than anything else in its history — the publication
on September 16, 191 8, of an editorial favoring the
consideration of the Austrian proposal for a "pre-
liminary and non-binding" discussion of peace terms.
The opinion which found expression in this article
was first, that the Austrian proposal meant the be-
ginning of the end — which was true; and second,
that it was worth considering, on the theory that
when conferences had begun the enemy would rap-
idly give way to complete surrender. Whether that
would or would not have happened is, of course, a
question to which there can be no answer. If the
shiftiness of the Germans in their subsequent nego-
tiations with Mr. Wilson suggests that this prelimi-
nary conference might have given opportunity for
a good deal of intrigue, it is true on the other hand
that the rapid caving in of the German morale in
the fall of 191 8 might have led to exactly the same

356

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

result as did occur. It was not generally foreseen in
the middle of September that the war would be
over in less than two months; but the editor of The
Times had become convinced from his study of the
German press, and the other sources of information
available, that Germany was on the verge of col-
lapse, and was confident that if peace delegates once
met, the people of the Central Powers would insist
on peace at any price. In the Austrian proposal
he recognized evidence that Austria and Germany
were exhausted and would soon be ready to surren-
der on any terms at all. And The Times declared
that the Allies must insist on such peace terms as
were finally imposed on Germany at Versailles. It
was convinced that if negotiations began Germany
would soon be forced to accept whatever terms the
Allies might lay down.

That may have been a mistake, but it was at
least a tenable view. It was, unfortunately, a some-
what too long-sighted view for the popular mind in
the tenseness of the time, when everybody's blood
was at fever heat and there was general apprehen-
sion that peace negotiation might lose the fruit of
victory. The deviousness of German diplomacy was
well known, and the exhaustion of German endur-
ance was not generally understood. Perhaps some
of the phrases in the editorial were chiefly responsi-
ble for the unfavorable criticism, phrases expressing
a feeling such as everybody exhibited a few weeks
later on armistice day. If the editor of The Times
gave premature expression to that feeling, it was
because he saw further ahead than most people and
knew that this appeal meant that peace was near.

357

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

It must be added that the wide discussion of this
editorial, and the unfavorable reaction to it, was in
considerable part the work of other New York news-
papers, who talked of ^* The Times'' s white flag" and
even ventured on some insinuations about *' Aus-
trian gold," against the paper which every German
propagandist for four years past had been accusing
of subserviency to British gold.

No doubt these competitors of The Times were
inspired in part by vigilant patriotism, but other
motives may have had something to do with their
agitation. The Times had been making enormous
gains in circulation. It was within a very few thou-
sands of the largest circulation in New York, and it
had already distanced all the other morning papers.
The Herald — then, of course, a different paper and
under different ownership than at present — under-
took a great circulation campaign to win over Times
readers under such slogans as **Read an American
Paper." As had happened fifty-two years before, when
Raymond took the unpopular step of advocating
conciliation of the beaten South, The Times^s spotless
record for loyalty during the war was ignored by
journals which had found it a dangerously success-
ful business rival. But this loyalt}^ and the leader-
ship in news and opinion which The Times had won,
was not forgotten by the public. The circulation of
the paper was not affected, the clamor soon died
away, and the assaults of jealous and failing com-
petitors were as futile as they were groundless.

At the outbreak of the war the military authori-
ties of all the nations engaged had the idea, correct

358

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

enough from a purely military viewpoint, that the
newspapers and the public need know nothing about
what was going on until it was all over. The suc-
cess of the Japanese in keeping war correspondents
out of the way in Manchuria had shown other army
officers what could be done, and the strategic ad-
vantage that was to be derived from doing it. Some
months passed before it began to be apparent to
the various governments, and in time even to the
mihtary commanders, that every nation wanted to
know what was going on, and would fight better if
it knew. In the early months the task of news get-
ting was hard enough, and the news that was ob-
tained was mostly official and open to considerable
suspicion.

Eventually, of course, all this was changed. Be-
fore the end of the war the correspondent had be-
come a personage universally respected — if not, like
MacGahan and Forbes and Russell and the men of
their day, respected because he was more important
than the war he was covering, at any rate respected
and treated with some deference because Ministers
and Generals knew that the public wanted to know
what was happening and that this man was going
to tell it.

The New York Times at the outbreak of the war
was getting its war news from The London Daily
Chronicle, and from its own correspondents in Lon-
don and Paris. It was unable to get the other side
of the case from its own correspondent in Berlin, for
the German Government had locked up and then
expelled this gentleman on the ground that, though
an American citizen, he was correspondent not only

359

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

for The Times but for The London Daily Mail, and
consequently might be engaged in espionage. But
the war was only a few weeks old when The Times
got another correspondent into Germany, a corre-
spondent who through school and family acquaint-
ances had unusual facility of access to German mili-
tary circles, and who, during 1914, 191 5 and 1916,
succeeded in presenting probably the best picture
given in the American press of the operations of the
German Army on all fronts. This correspondent
was Cyril Brown, at present The Times correspon-
dent in Berlin, who almost at the beginning of
his career in Germany managed, partly by his own
ingenuity and partly by the assistance of a train-
man whom he had met while covering a strike m
Jersey City some years before, to get to German
Great Headquarters at Mezieres-Charleville and send
to The Times the first account anywhere published
of the scenes there. Brown's subsequent operations
took him to every German battle front, and in addi-
tion, with the assistance of Joseph Herrings, he cov-
ered the political news from Berlin.

Other American correspondents in Germany per-
formed a brilliant and useful work in interviewing
the leaders of the German Government and sending
out to the world their opinions on the progress of
the war, though it is to be regretted that some of
them eventually came to believe a good deal of
what was said to them; but Brown, while doing com-
paratively little of this sort of thing, outdistanced all
other American writers in his reporting of the Ger-
man Army in action.

Now and then he had assistance, as for example
360

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

during Mackensen's Serbian campaign in the fall of
191 5, and in the early days of the Verdun offensive,
when The Times obtained by special arrangement
the reports of the staff correspondents of several
BerHn daihes in addition to the nev/s gathered by
its own men. To make sure that nothing going on
in Germany was overlooked, The Times sent Garet
Garrett in 191 5 and Oscar King Davis at the end of
1916 to write special articles on the economic situa-
tion and the wearing quahties of German morale.

Besides getting the news out of Germany, The
Times now and then got some news into Germany
— notably in February, 1917, when the German
Government had been aroused by rumors that Am-
bassador Bernstorff was being detained in America
after the rupture of diplomatic relations and that
all German ships in American ports, and their crews,
had been seized. These false reports had inspired the
German Government with the idea that Ambassa-
dor Gerard and all Americans in Berlin might be de-
tained by way of retaliation. A private message
from the managing editor of The Times to O. K.
Davis, correcting these false impressions, was shown
by the correspondent to the German Foreign Office
and was chiefly responsible for the release of the
Americans in Berlin.

On other fronts, as the war went on. The Times
was better and better served. Of the numerous and
usually able correspondents of The London Chron-
icle the most distinguished was Philip Gibbs, whose
dispatches from the British front in the later years
of the war were perhaps the most generally popular
war correspondence of the period. Gibbs's peculiar

361

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

talent happened to meet a very general psycholog-
ical need of the public in 1917 and 1918; and he was
more widely read, and probably on the whole more
generally admired, in America than even in England.

Of The Times^s own correspondents with the allied
armies Wythe WiUiams, head of the Paris office in
the early days of the war, wrote a number of excel-
lent stories from the battle-fronts in France and
Italy. Edwin L. James, at present Paris correspond-
ent of The Times, was the principal correspondent
with the American armies in 191 8, and supplied
thrilling accounts of their achievements. Walter
Duranty brilliantly described the successful resist-
ance of the French armies to the German onslaught
of 191 8. Charles A. Selden sent the poHtical news
from Paris in the same year. Charles H. Grasty of
the executive staff of the paper, possessing a wide
acquaintance among both soldiers and statesmen,
wrote a great deal from the British, French and
American battle-fronts, though the greater part of his
correspondence was political. Of the many others
who at various times and from various fronts sent
dispatches to The Times, perhaps special mention
should be given to Georges Le Hir, who wrote from
Verdun in the spring of 191 6 some of the best battle
pictures of the war.

The news from the battle-fronts was constantly
supplemented by all kinds of news about the war
from the writers, newspapers, and press agencies of
every country in Europe presented each morning
for what it was worth to the readers of The Times.
The most important contribution to the assembling
of this news was that of the London office, headed

362

VIEWS OF THE COMPOSING ROOM.

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

by Ernest Marshall, which without making much
parade of its merits acquired an extraordinarily high
standard of all-round efficiency. Mention should
be made also of Enid Wilkie, correspondent at The
Hague, who was responsible for most of the news
about what was going on in Germany after America
declared war.

The amount of news received by The Times, by
cable and wireless, from its own correspondents, on
a number of days in the latter part of the war sur-
passed in the total number of words the dispatches
of the largest news associations, and often exceeded
all the special dispatches to all other American news-
papers combined. The handhng of this mass of
news in the office naturally involved problems unex-
ampled in magnitude if not new in kind, and in the
delicate technical question of make-up, the arrange-
ment of news with due consideration of its relative
importance, as well as of the appearance of the page
on which it is printed. The Times in the course of the
war developed a general style to which many of its
competitors paid the compliment of imitation. It
was impossible, in the war period, to get all the big
news on the front page, but The Times usually got
more of it there than other papers, and in an ar-
rangement which was at once pleasing to the eye
and calculated to make it easy for the reader to see
at once what had happened, as well as to give him
some idea of the importance of the various dis-
patches.

The war make-up involved a considerable devel-
opment in the art of headline composition. The
limitation of the width of the column is one of the

363

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

chief technical difficulties in the presentation of news
to a pubhc which has learned to look for headlines
that tell the story. And even when the head is ex-
tended to two or three columns, or seven or eight,
the wider room for display does not remove all the
difficulties. The Times in its headlines tries, and
its conductors hope with a fair degree of success, to
be fair and accurate; to pack the substance of the
story, without prejudice, into the four or five words
which may be all of the story that some readers W\\\
ever read.

Carr V. Van Anda, the managing editor, was in
charge not only of the great organization which was
collecting the news all over the world, but of the
no less intricate and efficient organization within the
office which had the work of arranging and present-
ing the news. In this latter field he was ably as-
sisted by F. T. Birchall, assistant managing editor.
The mechanical department under the very com-
petent supervision of Charles F. Hart successfully
responded in those days to a heavy strain and made
an important contribution to the success of the
paper.

From the day the Lusitania was sunk the war
was no longer a European question, and thereafter,
week in and week out, it pretty steadily dominated
the news in every New York paper. Even then, of
course, most papers of the interior found it less im-
portant than events closer home, and continued to
give it rather limited space until America came in.
As the war went on more and more of the most in-
telligent class of readers all over the country found
that if they really wanted news about the war they

364

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

could find it in greatest volume and most satisfac-
torily presented in The Times,

The first award of the Pulitzer gold medal for
** disinterested and meritorious service" by a news-
paper was made by the School of Journalism of
Columbia University to The New York Times in
June, 191 8, **for publishing in full so many official
reports, documents, and speeches by European states-
men relating to the progress and conduct of the war."
The editors of The Times believed that their circula-
tion contained an unusually high proportion of
readers who were willing to give the time to reading
long speeches and long documents, not necessarily
because they had superfluous time on their hands,
but because they realized that in a war of this kind
full understanding required careful study, and that
study of the evidence was the most important busi-
ness of any intelligent man. The editors thought,
too, that The Times more than any other paper was
read by people who were capable of forming their
own opinions from study of the original evidence
in full, and who would rather have every word avail-
able for their own study than accept a summary
made by somebody else.

An illustration of the methods of The Times in
getting together these documents from the most
widely scattered sources may be found in the his-
tory of the pubhcation of Prince Lichnowsky's fa-
mous memorandum on German diplomatic methods
and the outbreak of the war. Parts of this had
been published in various German and Swedish
papers, and in The New Europe of London, and

365

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

many extracts from these publications had been
cabled to the American press. But the document
was for the first time printed in full in The New
York Times, the text having been laboriously assem-
bled from the five or six partial pubHcations in Ger-
many, Sweden and England. Something like this
The Times was doing constantly during 191 8, and
by industry and vigilance succeeded in piecing to-
gether a good deal of evidence which other publica-
tions, both in America and abroad, had been con-
tent to accept in fragmentary form.

Every one was calling on his reserves in 191 8,
from Foch and LudendorfF down to the humblest
citizen on the internal front who was setting his
teeth and accustoming himself to new privations,
and the human race as a whole was probably liv-
ing more intensely and putting more of its poten-
tial abilities into action than ever before. It is per-
haps natural, then, that The Times was at its best
in this last year of the war. Its conductors are not
conscious of any particular deterioration since that
time, but there was more opportunity for excellence
to display itself in the conditions of this last war year.

In the interchange of speeches that made up the
most visible though by no means the only phase of
the ** peace offensives" of the winter of 191 7-1 8
The Times had scored again and again by printing the
addresses in full, by a make-up and typography which
put the news out where the reader could see it and
gave him some hints about its relative importance,
and in the case of speeches delivered by German or
Austrian statesmen very often by getting the news
a day earlier than the other papers. The peace of-

366

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

fensive broke down and LudendorfF began a new
offensive of a different kind on March 21, 1918. In
The Times office it was recognized on the evening
of that day that this was the great and decisive con-
flict of the war, although elsewhere, and even in
London, it was some days before the magnitude and
importance of Ludendorff's operations was per-
ceived. From that time on The Times was gener-
ally a day ahead of the crowd. Every correspondent
had been instructed on the evening of March 21
thenceforward to spare no expense or effort to get
his news into the office promptly. The result was
that day after day The Times was the only Ameri-
can paper which had its own dispatches describing
the fighting of the day before. The Associated
Press news arrived on time, for the Associated
Press had, properly enough, received special facili-
ties for getting its news through. Other American
papers had special dispatches from their own cor-
respondents, but for two or three months they gen-
erally got them and published them a day late.
Within a few weeks after March 21 The Times was
able to announce that since that date it had scored
more than one hundred beats, including such items
of news as Foch's appointment as generalissimo, the
removal of General Gough after the defeat of the
British Fifth Army, and Count Czernin's speech
against Clemenceau, which had the result of bring-
ing to the Ught the Austro-French peace negotiations
of the previous year.

The official censorships of the various European
governments interfered considerably, of course, with

367

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the news dispatches of The Times, as they did with
those of all other papers. No effort was made to
circumvent these censorships, but in one instance the
censorship was evaded by a sort of impromptu code,
with the result that The Times beat all other papers,
in America and elsewhere, on two highly important
news stories. Under cover of the ostensible discus-
sion by cable of some changes in The Times^s Euro-
pean staff information was obtained of the decision
to supplant Joffre as generalissimo of the French
armies, of the consideration of various men for his
position and finally of the appointment of Nivelle.
A few months later the same formula brought to
The Times office, again in advance of the official an-
nouncement, the news that Nivelle was to be re-
placed by Petain.

Like all other newspapers, however. The Times
tolerated foreign censorships because it had no choice,
and not because it liked their methods or admired
their results. When America came into the war and
the first draft of the Espionage Act contained a pro-
vision for an American censorship. The Times was
one of the most vigorous opponents of any such
measure. The experience of European governments
had shown that, while censors may occasionally be
necessary, they are always stupid, and the likeli-
hood that personal or political considerations would
influence a censor in Washington was quite as
strong as the certainty that such considerations had
already played their part in Europe.

Eventually the clause was deleted from the Es-
pionage Act, and in place of Government regulation
came the "voluntary censorship," by which Ameri-

368

THE TIMES IN THE WAR, 1914-1918

can newspapers refrained from printing news that
might be of mihtary advantage to the enemy.

One hundred and eighty-nine members of The
Times staff, including two women, served in the
armed forces of the United States during the war.
Of these the following five were killed or died in
service:

Major William Sinkler Manning,
of the Washington Bureau;

Lieutenant William Bradley,
of the business office;

Sergeant Joyce Kilmer,

of the Sunday magazine staff;

Private Harold J. Behl,
proofreader;

Private Edward B. Pierce,
of the composing room.

369

CHAPTER VI
The Times Today

^T^HE end of the war found The Times at the height
-*■ of its influence and power, but the peak of its
business prosperity was still to come. In the boom
of 1 91 9 and the early months of 1920 The Times
at last expanded in size from the 24-page issue which
had been the limit for the week-day paper up to the
end of the war, and often since then has printed
32, 36 or even 40 pages a day. Even so, the volume
of advertising offered was so great that day after
day much of it had to be refused on account of lack
of space. Yet the total printed in 1920 was more
than 23,000,000 agate lines — nearly 80,000 columns,
and almost ten times the amount printed in the first
year of the new management. The greatest volume
of advertising ever carried in the paper was on
Sunday, May 23, 1920, when The Times printed in
all j6y columns of advertisements. The paper on
that day contained altogether 136 pages, including
24 pages of rotogravure pictorial supplement and
16 pages of tabloid book review. It weighed two
pounds and ten ounces, and no doubt it felt like
ten pounds and two ounces to the wxary house-
holder who picked it off the doorstep; but experi-
ence has shown that even in a paper of that size
there is nothing that a good many readers do not
want.

370

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THE TIMES TODAY

The impression is widely prevalent that as the
paper increases in size the publisher loses money on
account of the high price of newsprint. This, how-
ever, is a mistake. The advertising rates include
the cost of the paper on which advertisements are
printed, so that the increased cost involves only
pages devoted to news. The only danger in in-
creasing the size of the paper is that it may pos-
sibly become so bulky as to dissatisfy the reader,
and The Times has not yet felt that handicap.
Some of its readers complain that it is too large,
but nobody complains that it prints too much news
about the things in which he is interested. The
man whose chief interest is in the stock market may
think there is too much news about sports, and vice
versa; but there is not too much financial news for
the investor, nor too much sporting news for the
follower of sports. From the four-page paper of six
short columns which Raymond got out in 1851 to
The Times of forty eight-column pages which has oc-
casionally appeared in recent years is a long jump;
but no greater than the increase in the extent of the
intelligent reading pubHc, nor in the variety of that
public's interests.

The most important feature of The Times^s edi-
torial policy since the war has been its championship
of the League of Nations, a cause in which its edi-
tors were interested long before the armistice, and
which they regard as destined to ultimate triumph
in some form — most probably in a form very much
Hke that which was adopted by the Paris peace con-
ference. Throughout that conference The Times

371

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

steadily supported the general policies of President
Wilson, though it could not agree with him on some
details. Its editors felt that it was a mistake for
him to go to Paris in person, but later they came to
the conclusion that the President had been right,
and that by his presence at the conference he had
obtained some results which would have been im-
possible for any negotiator of less eminence. They
thought, and still think, that he made a mistake in
not taking with him representative leaders of the
Republican party, as well as in showing too plainly
an opinion reasonable enough in itself of the endow-
ments and the character of some eminent Senators.
On some of the territorial, political or economic
items of the peace settlements, too. The Times could
not accept the President's views.

But its conductors thought that these objections
were all of minor importance and irrelevant to the
principal issues. With the President's opinion that
the League was all-important they were in entire
accord, as well as with his position on most of the
territorial and economic questions in dispute. They
thought the Treaty of Versailles was not ideally per-
fect, but about the best treaty that could have been
obtained. And they held the opinion, none too com-
mon in the United States in 1919, that after all the
President was the representative of the entire Ameri-
can people at the peace conference, that it was im-
possible for him to get his way on every point of
diflFerence with the other delegates, and that an en-
lightened view of national interest, to say nothing
of those more general considerations of universal
welfare which his opponents so vehemently dis-

372

THE TIMES TODAY

claimed, made it advisable for the American people
to forget trivial objections and give their consider-
ation rather to the things the President had done.
He had, after all, won the chief points for which he
was contending as the constitutionally designated
negotiator for the American people, and won them,
if at the price of some concessions, over strenuous
opposition. It was unlikely that any other American
official would ever be able to impose American views
so extensively on the other great powers of the world.

There can be no doubt that much of the antago-
nism which finally wrecked Mr. Wilson's peace plans
was due to his personality rather than his accompHsh-
ments, to his methods rather than his results. It
seemed to The Times that ordinary common sense
might suggest that the people whom he represented
should give first consideration to the work which he
had done, and to the effect of that work upon their
own interests, rather than to their opinions of Mr.
Wilson as an individual. No doubt, some consci-
entious opponents of the League took this point of
view, and based their opposition to the Treaty on
an honest conviction that it was harmful to Ameri-
can interests. But there is evidence everywhere in
plain sight that a good many people opposed the
Treaty merely because they disliked the President.

Throughout the fight in the Senate and through
the campaign of 1920 The Times gave its utmost
support to the cause of the League and to those
public men who promised to support that cause.
The violent debate within the Republican Party as
to whether the election of Mr. Harding meant a
victory for the League or the utter rejection of the

373

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

League it viewed with sympathetic but detached In-
terest, convinced that the logic of facts would pres-
ently bring to reason those RepubHcan leaders who
are capable of reason. Until that time shall come
The Times^s view of the particular accomplishments
of the Republican Administration is determined by
its judgment of their specific merits and not by gen-
eral or doctrinal considerations.

Yet, in spite of its conviction that the League is
necessary and indeed inevitable, in spite of its sup-
port of the Democratic ticket in the 1920 campaign,
The Times has given its support to many of the
policies of President Harding. This does not mean
that The Times is always an administration paper.
It does mean, however, that the conductors of The
Times realize that the President of the United States
is the President of the whole people and not of a
single party, that his public acts affect the whole
people and that it is to the interest of every citizen
to get as effective and competent an administration
as possible. With the type of partisanship which
sees the entrance of the opposition into power as
meaning nothing but opportunity for criticism The
Times has little sympathy. It preferred Mr. Cox to
Mr. Harding; but Mr. Harding having been elected
it realized that he was going to be the Chief Magis-
trate of the United States for the next four years,
and that sensible citizens would do well to encour-
age all the praiseworthy policies which his adminis-
tration might pursue without stopping to fear that
they might bring prestige to the Republican Party.

Whether Republican, Independent or Democratic,
The Times has never been able to convince itself that

374

THE TIMES TODAY

opposition must mean consistent hostility to every-
thing done by the party in power. Its conductors
regard the intei ests of the nation as somewhat more
important than the record of any party, and they
have been genuinely glad to be able to commend many
of the works accomplished or attempted by President
Harding and the leading members of his Cabinet.
With some of the elements in the Republican Party
The Times is entirely out of sympathy, and had repre-
sentatives of those factions been chosen to direct the
executive functions of the government, the paper
would no doubt have had occasion to criticize their
conduct rather severely; but, considering the record of
the administration purely on its merits, the editors of
The Times have been pleased to be able to recog-
nize the fact that its performance, in the early
months at least, has been meritorious in a rather
high degree.

Several changes in the personnel of the paper in
recent years may call for special mention. Mr.
George McAneny resigned as President of the Board
of Aldermen on February I, 1916, to become execu-
tive manager of The Times. His duties were chiefly
confined to the study of the newsprint paper situation
which gave so much concern to all American papers
during the war period and which is The Times^s
chief item of expenditure. In 1920 The Times spent
for print paper ^5,963,839.42. In 1897, the first full
year under the present management, that item cost
only $45,955.63. On January i, 1918, the Tidewater
Paper Company, of Bush Terminal, Brooklyn, with
a capacity of 30,000 tons of newsprint per year, was

375

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

acquired by the New York Times Company in order
to insure a supply of paper in New York free from
outside interruptions by strikes, weather, etc.

With The Times* s paper supply contracted for and
assured for the next five years, Mr. McAneny with-
drew from the Times organization in March, 1921, and
soon afterward was appointed chairman of the
Transit Commission.

Mr. Samuel Strauss, well known as one of the live-
liest of magazine critics of current affairs, was with
The Times as treasurer of the company from 191 2
to the end of 191 5. Mr. Rollo Ogden, editor-in-chief
of The New York Evening Post for many years, came
to The Times on May 15, 1920, as associate editor;
and Dr. John H. Finley, Commissioner of Education
of the State of New York, resigned that office and
joined The Times staff, also as an associate editor,
on January 17, 1921.

Note may be made here of the following members
of The Times' s staff who died either in its service or
after long years with the paper:

Edward Cary, for forty-six years an editorial
writer and for much of that period associate editor;
died May 23, 1917.

Theodore Lawrence Peverelly, for forty-three
years a member of the business staff; died February
4, 1904.

Arthur Greaves, city editor from 1900 and a
reporter for many years before; died October 19, 191 5.

Charles Welborne Knapp, treasurer of The New
York Times Company and formerly publisher of
The St. Louis Republic; died January 6, 191 6.

Edward Augustus Dithmar, whose forty years
376

THE TIMES TODAY

of service as dramatic critic, London correspondent,
literary editor and editorial writer, ended with his
death on October i6, 1917.

Montgomery Schuyler, for twenty-four years an
editorial writer; died July 16, 1914.

Jacob H. Thompson, for thirty-seven years with
the paper, much of the time as exchange editor; died
September 8, 1905.

John Hebard Paine, for fourteen years with The
Times, the last four years as night city editor; died
October 2, 1920.

John Norris, for many years business manager,
died March 21, 1914.

Barnet Phillips, whose thirty-three years of
service Included editorial work on the Sunday edition
and book reviewing; died April 8, 1905.

Leopold Wallach, general counsel of The Times
from August 18, 1896, to his death on January 25,
1908.

Elbridge G. Dunnell, Washington correspond-
ent of The Times from 1879 to 1902; died February

3. 1905-
Leonard B. Treharne, on The Times staff for

twelve years, most of that time as night city editor;

died October 17, 1904.

Major John M. Carson, In The Times Washing-
ton office from 1874 to 1882 and 1902 to 1905, and
for several years chief Washington correspondent;
died September 29, 1912.

George Butler Taylor, for twenty-six years a
reporter, died November 2, 1905.

Field Lynn Hosmer, forty years In service as
reporter and editorial auditor; died January 8, 1914.

?»77

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

George B. Mover, for twelve years superintend-
ent of The Times buildings, died December 9, 191 5.

As to the news service of The Times there is little
to add to what has been written in the last two
chapters. It has continued as it was during the
war, though perhaps with a somewhat higher degree
of efficiency, due to experience. The Peace Confer-
ence was covered for The Times by members of the
paper's own staff — Richard V. Oulahan, head of
the Washington Bureau; Ernest Marshall, head of
the London office; Charles A. Selden and Edwin L.
James, of the Paris office, and Charles H. Grasty of
the executive department — and by Gertrude Ather-
ton, until she fell ill and had to return to America.
They scored a number of *' beats," notably on the
occasion of President Wilson's threat to abandon
the Peace Conference, but most of the leading
American papers scored '* beats'' during the nego-
tiations. As before, the excellence of The Times
was rather in a higher average than in out-
standing single achievements. Indeed, it could be
said that the war and the Peace Conference both
proved the value of the American system of news-
paper training. Generally speaking, the best war
correspondents and the best political correspondents
at the Peace Conference were men who had gone
through the ordinary routine of the American re-
porter, rather than experts who had specialized in
war correspondence or international politics all their
lives. Most American reporters found that they
could learn what they needed about war and inter-
national politics; while the sense of news values,

578

K
H

H
w

THE TIMES TODAY

and the diligence in getting news, which is devel-
oped by the ordinary reportorial training in America,
and which, of course, had been very highly devel-
oped in the men who were selected for the important
assignments of the war and the peace negotiations,
cannot be improvised by specialists when they are
suddenly faced by extraordinarily keen competition.

Perhaps there should be special mention of the
Washington correspondence of The Times, which is
probably not only more voluminous, but more im-
partial, than that of any other paper. The practice of
coloring the news to suit editorial policy, which
was once too common in the American press, has
pretty generally disappeared in recent years except
in a minority of papers. But it has tended to sur-
vive longest in the Washington correspondence,
where there is still, in the case of most newspapers,
a tendency to hunt out first of all such news as agrees
with the paper's prejudices.

This does not involve suppression of news, nor
even distortion. The relativity of truth is a com-
monplace to any newspaper man, even to one
who has never studied epistemology; and, if the
phrase is permissible, truth is rather more relative in
Washington than anywhere else. Now and then it
is possible to make a downright statement; such and
such a bill has passed in one of the houses of Congress,
or failed to pass; the administration has issued this
or that statement; the President has approved, or
vetoed, a certain bill. But most of the news that
comes out of Washington is necessarily rather
vague, for it depends on the assertions of statesmen
who are reluctant to be quoted by name, or even by

379

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

description. This more than anything else is respon-
sible for the sort of fog, the haze of miasmatic exha-
lations, which hangs over news with a Washington
date line. News coming out of Washington is apt
to represent not what is so but what might be so
under certain contingencies, what may turn out to be
so, what some eminent personage says is so, or even
what he wants the public to believe is so when it is
not.

For an illustration one need go no further back
than the various semi-official assertions on high
authority of the intentions of the Harding adminis-
tration about cooperation with Europe, which turned
out to be pretty nearly loo per cent untrue. The
explanation is that most of these assertions came
from irreconcilable Senators who honestly thought
they could speak for the administration and who
were accepted by correspondents as speaking for
the administration; but who, as a matter of fact,
knew less about the real intentions of the adminis-
tration than the White House doorkeeper.

Obviously, then, the Washington correspondent
has a pretty wide field of choice. On almost any
question he can get directly opposite opinions —
and most "news" from Washington is a matter of
opinion — from equally high authority, and from
authority which he is not permitted to identify. It
is not strange that between two stories of appar-
ently equal merit he is inclined to prefer the one
which will be most welcome in the office. Generally
speaking. The Times Washington correspondence
has been very little open to criticism on this point.
No paper supported the League of Nations more

380

THE TIMES TODAY

vigorously than The Times; its editorials consist-
ently favored the League, and its columns once
more, as during the war, became the principal
forum for the debates of publicists. Yet it was evi-
dent through the entire discussion, to those who read
The Times Washington correspondence, that there
was little chance of the League finding favor in the
Senate. The Times supported Cox in the 1920
Presidential campaign, but its political correspond-
ence made it fairly plain long before the election that
Harding was certain to win.

It should be added that The Times, alone of promi-
nent Democratic papers, denounced as false, slander-
ous and contemptible the "campaign of whispers"
against Mr. Harding during the last weeks of the
campaign.

The year 1919 gave The Times, always so keenly
interested in aviation, a chance to cover very fully
the news of the first flights across the Atlantic. Its
interest in wireless telegraphy had already been vin-
dicated, and at present all newspapers are enjoying
wireless service which might have been somewhat
longer delayed if The Times had not been so fully
convinced of the possibilities of this art a decade ago.
The end of the war brought, of course, an increase
in the amount of space devoted to local news, which
had been somewhat reduced in the days when the
dispatches from the battle-fronts were of supreme
importance; as well as a great expansion in The
Times sporting department, responding to the great
increase of interest in sports which followed the com-
ing of peace.

381

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Times was the only paper in the United States,
or in the world, which printed the full text of the
draft of the peace treaty. As will be remembered,
the document was given to Senator Borah on June 9,
191 9, by a correspondent of The Chicago Tribune, and
by vote of the Senate was spread upon the Congres-
sional Record. That night the Washington corre-
spondents of The Times got proof sheets from the
government printers as fast as the copy was set up,
and dispatched the text to New York on twenty-four
telegraph and telephone wires obtained for the occa-
sion. On the morning of June 10 The Times had all
of it — sixty-two columns, occupying most of the
first eight pages of the second section of a forty-page
paper.

The news service of The Times today is pretty well
known to several hundred thousand readers who pre-
fer The Times to any other paper. If anything
further is to be said about its quality it may best be
said by the mention of one or two instances of The
Times' s methods and their results. During the politi-
cal conventions of 1920 The Times pretty regularly
had more news and more reliable news than the other
papers, and had it first. These conventions were
covered by a staff of nine men, all regular employes
of the paper. The Times saw no need for hiring re-
nowned experts, humorists, or fiction writers to
supplement the work of its own men; and if any
of its readers missed these features they did not
say so.

The Democratic National Convention at San
Francisco offered some technical problems of excep-
tional difficulty. Because San Francisco is 3000

382

THE TIMES TODAY

miles west of New York, and because New York
saves daylight while San Francisco does not, San
Francisco time is four hours earlier than that of New
York. That meant that the first edition of most
New York morning papers was going to press at a
little past midnight, only a few minutes after the
night sessions of the Democratic Convention were
beginning in San Francisco. Despite this fact. The
Times had some news from the beginning of the night
sessions in its first edition on every night of the con-
vention, and its second edition, coming off the presses
shortly before 2 o'clock, had about as much news as
other papers were able to get on the streets at day-
light.

Another difficult}^ in getting the news out of San
Francisco was due, or rather seemed likely to be due,
to the limited telegraphic facilities. Even the highest
officials of the Western Union and the Postal did not
realize, in advance, just how much their local organ-
izations were going to be able to accomplish. As it
turned out, the Western Union wire arrangements
were more than sufficient to handle all the news of
the convention; but this was not knov/n beforehand.
As a matter of precaution The TimeSy which was un-
able to obtain the lease of direct wires into its office
from the telegraph companies, finally made a round-
about connection through Canada. A telephone
v/ire was leased for night service from San Francisco
to Vancouver and another from New York to Mon-
treal. Between these two cities connection was
established by a lease of a Canadian Pacific railroad
telegraph wire, and the whole circuit was operated
by telegraph with a ** relay " at Vancouver — operated

383

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

so well that news dictated to a telegraph operator in
the convention hall at San Francisco was in The
Times office in New York within two minutes.

The long-distance telephone was used every night
during the convention, and was responsible for the
pubUcation in the first edition, on the final night, of
news which foreshadowed Palmer's withdrawal a
little later in the evening.

All these are things such as all papers do, now and
then, and the only distinction of The Times is that it
does them more regularly, more smoothly and, on the
whole, with more success. As a final instance of the
operation of The Times news service today may be
mentioned the handling of the news of the German
reparations proposals of April 26 last — proposals
which, it will be remembered, were sent to the
United States Government in the vain hope of ob-
taining American mediation in some form, and which
embodied the last German effort at compromise be-
fore the surrender to the aUied demands, which took
place a few days later.

The American declaration that all previous Ger-
man offers were unsatisfactory reached the German
Cabinet at 11 a.m. on April 26 — that is, 5 a.m.
New York time. It was known that the answer
would be prompt; that, as a matter of form, it
would be sent to the American government; but
that, since Mr. Harding and Mr. Hughes would not
even transmit to the allied governments any pro-
posal which those governm.ents were likely to re-
ceive with disfavor, there would be informal inquiries,
as soon as it was received, to find out if it were ac-
ceptable. If not, it would wither and die in a Wash-

384

THE TIMES TODAY

ington pigeonhole, so far as official transmission was
concerned.

The German note came to Washington on the
evening of Wednesday, April 26, and a vague and
general intimation as to its contents was given out to
all the correspondents there. A summary of the note
was also given to The Associated Press in BerHn,
and on the morning of Thursday, April 27, that was
all that the other New York Papers had about the
German offer.

But The Times realized that the text of the note
might be available not only in Berlin, where it was
written, and in Washington, where it was received,
but also in London and Paris, where the governments
would be informally acquainted with its text before the
note was officially transmitted. Consequently The
Times correspondents in Washington, London, Paris
and Berlin were all instructed to try to get the note
verbatim. In Washington and Berlin only in-
adequate summaries were obtainable; the summary
given out by the German government was in one or
two points seriously misrepresentative and tended
to represent the offer as larger than it actually
was.

But The Times correspondents both in London and
in Paris obtained and cabled the full text of the note
on Wednesday night, the Paris copy arriving first,
but only ten minutes ahead of that from London.
The Times alone of New York papers published it in
full on Thursday morning. The Times alone of New
York papers published the fact that the French gov-
ernment had officially refused to consider the offer
and had notified Secretary Hughes of its decision to

38s

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

this effect. Two other papers in New York had Paris
dispatches predicting, on the basis of Premier
Briand's speech in the Chamber that afternoon, that
the French Government would reject the note; the
others had not even that much. The Times was also
the only New York paper which printed on Thursday
morning the comments of the Paris press in their
issues of the same day — comments, of course, which
could be transmitted only because of the five-hour
difference in time, but which no other New York
paper received in time for publication.

Thus on one of the most important pieces of world
news in the year 1921 The Times alone, except for
the papers which purchase The Times' s news service
for publication in other cities, pubHshed the contents
of the German proposal and the fact of the French
refusal to consider it. An achievement of this sort
tells a good deal more about the quality of a paper
than the exclusive publication of a single story ac-
quired by the wide acquaintance of some member of
its staff. It is a feat which cannot be performed on
the spur of the moment; it implies an intricate and
highly trained organization. That organization is
the chief distinction of The Times today.

The story of the modern Times has been told —
inadequately and imperfectly, but as fully and im-
partially as it can be told by its own family. In
those twenty-five years The Times has gone further
and grown faster than even the men who controlled
it foresaw, and its growth is not yet ended. There is
room for improvement, and the men who get it out
every day are constantly trying to improve it; there

386

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THE TIMES TODAY

is room for still greater increase in prosperity and
influence.

No more than anything else on earth will American
journalism ever again be the same as before 1914.
What the opportunities and demands of the future
will be no newspaper man can see very clearly,
though some of them think they can see after a fash-
ion; but it is safe to say that they will require a
higher standard of merit from all newspapers than
that which was sufficient from 1865 to 1914. It will
probably be impossible for American newspapers of
the future to achieve greatness, or even much no-
toriety, by mere vigorous expression of partisan
political views. No New York paper, at least, will
ever again become great and prosperous by excellence
merely in local news. Newspapers of the future must'
give the news, and the news of the world. They must
combine in proper proportion the covering of the
news in their home tov/n, as they have learned that
art in the last half century, with the presentation of
the news from every continent as some of them have
learned to present it since 1914.

Modern science has made news-gathering more
difficult in the sense that it has broadened immeasur-
ably the possibilities of getting news and thus en-
abled the most enterprising newspapers to set a very
high standard for their competitors. The example
given above will suggest that when a news story may
be covered simultaneously by cable, wireless or tele-
graph, in London, Paris, Berlin and Washington, the
paper which expects to cover it merely by a telegram
from the Washington office is sometimes going to be
left behind. A good newspaper of today needs a

387

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

larger, more intricate, more efficient and more ex-
pensive organization than the best editors of twenty
years ago could have imagined.

It is possible that the progress of invention will
make competition still keener in another direction.
Last year, during the Republican Convention at
Chicago, The Times sent its city edition out by air-
plane mail and delivered it at Chicago in the course
of the afternoon. Before many years have gone this
may be a matter of course; and thus for the first
time it may be possible to have in America some-
thing approaching a really national newspaper.
There can never be national newspapers in this
country as in France and England, because of the
limitations our vast distances impose upon deliv-
ery; but when New York papers are delivered every-
where east of the Mississippi on the day of publica-
tion, as they certainly will be within a decade or so,
they will have an opportunity for taking on a good
deal more of a national character than they have
ever had in the past.

Undoubtedly The New York Times today ap-
proaches the character of a national newspaper
more nearly than any other in America. It does so,
of course, because of its copious presentation of
general news, national and international, which is
made possible by the fact that The Times is fortu-
nate enough to have in the city where it is published
a large clientele which will be interested in this news.
One of the obstacles in the way of establishing a sort
of generalized national newspaper such as is some-
times talked of by doctrinaires is the fact that
every newspaper has to be printed and published

388

THE TIMES TODAY

somewhere; that the difficulties of distribution
make it inevitable that a very large proportion of its
reading public will be local; and that most people
want to find in their paper a good deal of news about
the town in which they live. The Times attempts
to cover the local news as adequately as its com-
petitors, but it is fortunate in being the favorite
with that part of the New York reading public
which is also keenly interested in the news of the
world. It is, accordingly, able to devote a great
deal more of its space to the presentation in extenso
of news of general interest, and consequently has a
larger circulation outside the metropolitan district
than any other New York paper. It is widely read
in Washington; and in California it probably has a
larger circulation than all other New York papers
combined.

It is only a guess, but probably a safe guess, that
The Times is also more generally read over the
world than any other American paper. It has mail
subscribers in the Aland Islands, in Mauritius, and
all over the South Seas; m almost every state or
colony of Africa; in Sivas of Anatolia, in Tarsus of
Cilicia, in Bagdad and in Bandar Abbas. And by
no means all of its Asiatic subscribers are wandering
Americans; even outside of Japan and China, a good
many of them are Asiatics who find something of
interest in The New York Times.

The newspaper business in the future will not be a
game for pikers. The Times today has some 1800 em-
ployes; its daily pay roll exceeds ^10,000; it uses a daily
average of nearly 200 tons of paper. The cost
of news-getting may be surmised from the fact that

389

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

some $25,000 was spent by The Times in covering
the two national conventions of 1920. It would
be rather hazardous to assert that nobody could
come into the New York newspaper field today on a
*' shoestring," as Mr. Ochs did in 1896, and succeed
— hazardous, because even in 1896 all the experts
said that he could not rehabilitate The Times without
spending millions of dollars. But at least it seems
quite unlikely that anything like this could be done
now.

In the past twenty-five years five New York
papers have died. The Advertiser, The Mercury,
The News and The Press have all disappeared.
Neither The Herald nor The Sun has disappeared in
name, but at any rate there is only one morning
paper where both The Herald and The Sun grew
before. Of the papers which were in existence in
1896 and are still appearing today some have sur-
vived because they have made money, and some
because they are owned by wealthy men who can
stand the loss. And it is significant that the only
new daily paper which has been established in New
York in the past twenty-five years — a paper, it
should be observed, which is of a somewhat special-
ized character, predominantly a "picture paper,"
and can be produced much more cheaply than
a daily of the ordinary type — is owned by the
wealthy corporation which publishes The Chicago
Tribune, and which could not only supply The Daily
News with its telegraph and cable news and its
features without added cost, but could put up the
money to keep it going till it got on its feet.

The increased cost of production has reduced
390

THE TIMES TODAY

the number of papers in most of the other cities of
the country as well as in New York. It takes
money not only to start a paper but to keep it going
if it does not pay its way — more money than was
needed twenty-five years ago. The natural result is
concentration, the absorption of failing papers by
their more prosperous competitors. That perhaps
may not be altogether in the public interest, espe-
cially in a city of secondary rank which used to
support two or three morning papers and now has
only one. Even Chicago has now only two morning
newspapers in the English language. It is con-
ceivable that in a city of two and three quarter
milUon people there are a good many readers who
are not wholly satisfied with either of those papers,
but to start another in successful competition would
require both unusual ability and a great deal of
money.

New daily papers, unless supported by men who
are quite willing to go on throwing millions into them
until they get on their feet in competition with
established papers whose annual income alread}^
runs into the millions, are more likely to renounce
all hope of competing with those already established
in the covering of general news, and restrict them-
selves to particular interests. Even that will imply
some serious disadvantages; for example, with two
or three such publications competing with newspapers
of the more usual type there is bound to be a good
deal of waste in advertising. With certain news-
papers confining their energies to only a part of the
field, advertisers will be in doubt just how to reach
the public they want, and a good deal more of their

391

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

money will be required. In the opinion of the
management of The Times, advertising which does
not bring results is disadvantageous not only for the
advertiser, but for the newspaper; and the most
satisfactory situation for both is that in which the
actual situation of every newspaper both as to
quantity and quality of circulation is well known.

These dangers may not be imminent, in view of the
high cost of establishing a newspaper of any kind
in a large city; but in somewhat modified form
evils of this general character exist in present-day
advertising. In the opinion of the publisher of
The Times the most widespread defects of advertising
today are lost motion and low visibility; and it may
be in order to quote some of his thoughts on this sub-
ject delivered to the Associated Advertising Clubs of
the World in their convention at Philadelphia on
June 26, 1916:

It may startle you if I say that I doubt
if there is any business in the world in
which there is so much waste of time,
money, and energy as in advertising and
its correlative instrumentalities. It may
be rank heresy for me to say this, yet I
affirm that more than ^o per cent of the
money spent in advertising is squandered,
and is a sheer waste of printer's ink, be-
cause little thought and less intelligence are
applied, and ordinary common sense is
entirely lacking; too frequently the dishon-
esty stamped on its face is about all the
intelligent reader discerns.

The first essential of successful adver-
tising is something to advertise; the next,
to know how to advertise, and when and

392

THE TIMES TODAY

where. Too many advertisers have naught
to advertise save their impotence and their
folly. Too often the impelling reason is
vanity — to see their names in print — and
the greatest damage results when business
prudence is dethroned and the advertising
is done for ulterior reasons, either to favor
some individual or to promote some sinister
purpose. But it is not of that kind of wast-
age I wish to speak, for we have no interest
in that sort of advertiser. I have in mind
some well-intentioned advertisers' lost mo-
tion and consequently low visibility.

I say some advertisers — though I should
say many advertisers. To my mind the
worst evil is the thoughtless and careless
method in buying advertising space. If
the advertiser wishes to build a house or a
factory he investigates and informs him-
self; employs an architect; usually invites
proposals and awards the construction to a
responsible builder. When he buys his sup-
pHes he studies the markets; he informs
himself; he engages efficient assistants.
To sell his goods or products, he concen-
trates all his faculties to study the trade
and meet competition. But when he
comes to advertising, his business judg-
ment seems atrophied; his conceit pre-
dominates; his prejudices have full sway;
favoritism and personal feelings are potent
influences. The care and scrutiny he exer-
cises in all other branches are woefully lack-
ing in his advertising department. The
attitude assumed toward the publication
favored — I use the word favored advisedly
— is one of benevolence.

Let me illustrate the advertiser's lost
motion by an example. He decides to adver-

393

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

tise. He consults various agencies; he too
often selects the cheapest — lost motion.
A list of publications is selected; too often
the controlling factors are extra commission
or rebate, personal friendship, low rates —
lost motion. In the preparation of copy:
little time and poor talent employed —
lost motion. Finally, cheap papier-mache
impressions of the advertisement are sent
to the publications instead of good electro-
types, resulting in bad printing — lost
motion, and certainly low visibility, if any
visibility at all.

There are few acts of advertisers more
stupid than to give time and thought to
the preparation of copy, to fuss and fume
with artists and compositors for an effec-
tive display, pay large sums for space, and
then, to save a few pennies or a little time,
mar the whole effect by supplying the
publication a matrix from which to make
a stereotype plate. You often see evidence
of that kind of advertising shortsighted-
ness, for it stands out like a sore thumb.

Now, about lost motion and low visibility
by the advertising agent. The most glar-
ing fault is when the agent uses his credit
and standing beyond his personal resources
and speculates in the result of his client's
business. That's low visibility, for if he
would look beyond his nose he would dis-
cover breakers ahead and about them
frightful wreckage of some of the stoutest
ships, even when steered by the ablest
mariners. It is the exception that proves
the rule if an advertising agent, departing
from his legitimate business, avoids disaster.

An agent mars his reputation as a safe
adviser and counselor when, for the small

394

THE TIMES TODAY

immediate profit in sight, he takes the busi-
ness of an advertiser who has nothing to
advertise except, perhaps, a bad name; or
one whose advertising a tyro in the business
should know would bring no results. Here's
where truth should prevail, and the pro-
posed advertiser warned against wasting
his money.

"I only handle advertising which my
expert knowledge and experience cause me
to believe will justify the expenditure.''
What a drawing card that would be for an
agent if he could succeed in making those
interested know its truth.

Now, as to the publisher — the third
party to the transaction. How about his
lost motion and low visibility.'^ I cannot
even begin to catalogue his deHnquencies
under that head; it would consume too
much time. But this I will say, that there
is no other business in which there is so
much lost motion and low visibility as in
the publishing business. The wastage is
frightful, appalling, and disheartening to
those who have the temerity to acquaint
themselves with the facts.

I refer especially to newspaper publishers,
and it is of their bad practices I shall say
a few words, for I cannot trust myself to
unloose my pent-up feelings on that sub-
ject, in fear lest it largely partake of self-
condemnation.

In the matter of advertising rates there
seems to be only one established rule, viz.,
"All the traffic will bear.'' There seems
to be no standard, no basis from which to
begin, and consequently rates are altogether
arbitrary. Common sense and ordinary
rules of logic play little part. Rates are

395

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

fixed in the easiest way; that is, along the
line of least resistance. Is it any wonder
that the advertiser is disquieted and not
trustful when he is asked to sail the un-
charted seas?

The besetting sin is low rates. If you wish
to see intelligent advertising, effective
advertising, advertising that attracts the
reader, where there is the least lost motion
in space and words, you will find it in the
publications maintaining w^hat the adver-
tiser considers high rates; and, on the other
hand, the thoughtless, worthless advertising
predominates where the rates are low.

I am not comparing largely circulated
publications with those of small circulation.
I have in mind publications of relatively
the same circulation. When rates, in a de-
sirable medium, are what the advertiser
thinks comparatively high, he must con-
sider quality, and nine times out of ten the
quality or character of the circulation is
the deciding factor. Cheap rates destroy
more advertising than they create, for
they encourage useless and profitless ad-
vertising.

I have a theory that the basic rate should
be one cent a line per thousand circulation,
in a publication where the advertising
columns are given the consideration to
which they are entitled, and the advertising
placed to the best advantage for results
with regard to the publication's good repu-
tation and the reader's interest. There
may be less advertising space in the pub-
lication, but what there is would be better
done and more effective. I am discussing
advertising in its broadest aspect; cases
in which there is something to advertise

396

THE TIMES TODAY

and advertising space is purchased with
a view to the result of its direct appeal.

I wish to make clearer what I have just
said regarding the placing of advertising
with reference to the publication's good
reputation and the reader's interest. I
mean the advertisement should not be dis-
guised; the reader should recognize it as an
advertisement; no sailing under false colors.
Advertising that cannot pay one cent a
line per thousand circulation is hardly-
worth doing.

Newspapers have a variety of rates,
usually the highest for the business that
naturally comes to them, and the lowest for
such as prefer another medium; not infre-
quently this discrimination is against the
interests of the best clients.

The ideal newspaper advertising rate is
a flat rate — one rate for all kinds of ad-
vertising; no time or space discount; a
space limitation and extra charge for per-
missible exceptions and preferences.

There is no good excuse for reducing the
rate because the advertisement has news
value, for the greater the news value the
stronger the justification for remunerative
rates.

A word with reference to the belief in
some quarters that the advertiser bears too
great a proportion of the expense of pub-
hcation. This creates the popular delusion
of an unequal division of the expense be-
tween advertisers and readers. An estab-
Hshed newspaper is entitled to fix its
advertising rates so that its net receipts
from circulation may be left on the credit
side of the profit and loss account. To
arrive at net receipts, I would deduct from
397

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

the gross the cost of promotion, distribution,
and other expenses incidental to circulation.
I affirm this on the principle that the
advertiser wishes to encourage the widest
distribution, for without impairing its
merits the less costly the publication the
larger its circulation, hence the more
valuable and less costly the advertising; so,
the less the reader pays, the less the ad-
vertising costs, and if circulation augments
profits the publisher is rewarded for stimu-
lating it. To assert that therefore the
newspaper is solely or dangerously depend-
ent on the advertiser is to declare that
advertising has no value, that advertisers
have no inteUigence, and that the pub-
lisher does not know independence when
he enjoys it. It is an axiom in newspaper
publishing — "more readers, more inde-
pendence of the influence of advertisers;
fewer readers and more dependence on
advertisers." It may seem like a contra-
diction (yet it is the truth) to assert: the
greater the number of advertisers, the less
influence they are individually able to exer-
cise with the publisher.

A lot of nonsense is circulated about the
advertiser's control of the newspaper. A
newspaper improperly controlled by an
advertiser is the exception that proves the
rule.

There are some compensations for those dis-
advantages which modern conditions have brought.
The high cost of establishing a newspaper or of
conducting an unsuccessful newspaper makes it
rather unlikely that in the future papers will be
maintained, as they have sometimes been in the

398

THE TIMES TODAY

past, for ulterior reasons — that is, with some other
purpose than the presentation of the news. Finan-
cial or political interests are not likely to buy
papers to support their views if they are going to
have to spend millions on this type of publicity —
a type which is apt to be unremunerative, since a
paper subservient to external interests is usually
very soon recognized for what it is, and loses all
standing in consequence. Nor will it be so easy in
the future as it has been in the past for wealthy
men to buy newspapers as playthings.

The larger scale of present-day journalism has
some other advantages. It has pretty nearly re-
moved some of the temptations, such as subservience
to advertisers or to political subsidies, which were
constantly present with the publisher of past years.
The perils of journalism today are those of most other
human activities — slackness, routine, over-confi-
dence, shortsightedness. They are most serious,
perhaps, on the most successful papers, where the
temptation to ride on a great reputation is most
seductive. If American newspaper history teaches
anything, it teaches that riding on a reputation is
the surest road to ruin. Every paper in New York
can read that in its own record.

For these consolations, such as they are, all news-
paper men who take their business seriously should
be thankful. In a sense, perhaps, the newspaper
business is a public utility, but it differs from other
public utilities in that competition is essential to its
usefulness. Theoretically, there can be too much
competition in the newspaper field, but there is not
likely to be in the next few decades. And it is a bad

399

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

thing for any business to become so expensive that
only a rich man can even dream of coming into it and
shaking it up, for experience has shown that men who
have acquired wealth in other occupations rarely
provide very formidable competition when they go
into the newspaper business; and, like all other busi-
nesses, it needs shaking up now and then. In the
larger cities at least the newspaper field is virtually
closed, restricted to those who now occupy it. The
responsibility on them is all the heavier, for unless
they do their work well it will not be done. And it
has to be done in a democracy.

The recovery of The Times since 1896 is without
parallel in modern newspaper history, and for the
reasons given above it is likely to remain without
parallel. Yet it may be that its history has some
useful lessons for newspaper makers. What those
lessons are any reader may infer from the story which
has here been told. In the opinion of the manage-
ment of The Times, perhaps the most important les-
son is that integrity, common sense and good judg-
ment are more likely to bring success than wild
extravagances, constant experimentation and the
frantic following of each new fashion. The fact that
a particular policy or a particular feature has been a
success on one paper is no guarantee that it will be
successful everywhere. In the newspaper business,
as in most other businesses, the surest road to success
— in the opinion of the management of The Times —
is to know what you want to do and know how to do
it. If the new publisher who took charge of The
Times in 1896 had tried to imitate The Herald, The

400

THE TIMES TODAY

World ox The Journal — the three brilliantly successful
papers of the day — he would merely have accom-
pHshed his own ruin; and he could not have rebuilt
The Times if he had not known his business from the
ground up. Contrary to the opinion held in some
quarters, newspaper making is skilled labor; it can-
not be performed by any well-intentioned amateur.

401

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Twenty-five Years* Record of Advertising Growth
of ''The New York Times"

YEAR AGATE LINES

1896 2,227,196

1897 2,408,247

1898 . 2,433.193

1899 3.378,750

1900 3,978,620

I9OI 4.957.205

1902 5.501.779

1903 5,207,964

1904 5,228,480

1905 5.958,322

1906 6,033,457

1907 6,304,298

1908 5.897.332

1909 7.194.703

I9IO 7.550,650

I9II 8,130,425

I912 8,844,866

I913 9.327.369

I914 9.164,927

191 5 9,682,562

1916 11,552,496

1917 12,509,587

1918 13,518,255

1919 19,682,562

1920 o . . 23,447,395

402

HISTORY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Twenty-five Years' Record of Circulation Growth
of *'The New York Times*'

YEAR COPIES

October, 1896 21,516

1897 22,456

1898 25,726

1899' 76,260

1900 82,106

1901 102,472

1902 105,416

1903 106,386

1904 118,786

1905 120,710

1906 131,140

1907 i43>46o

1908 172,880

1909 i^4>3i7

1910 191,981

1911 i97>375

1912 209,751*

1913 230,360*

1914 259,673*

1915 318.274*

1916 340,904*

1917 357.225*

1918 368,492*

1919 362,971*

1920 342,553*

April 1921 352,528*

* Average net paid daily and Sunday circulation reported' to the Post OflBce De-
partment for the six months immediately preceding, in accordance with Act of Con-
gress August 24, 1912.

403

"All the News That's Fit to Print."

NEW YORK, TUESDAY, DEC. 15. 1914.

FOR THE GERMAN PEOPLE, PEACE
WITH FREEDOM.

Germany Is doomed to sure defeat.
Bankrupt In statesmanship, over-
matched in arms, under the moral con-
demnation of the civilized world, be-
fflended only by the Austrian and tho
TurK, two backward-loolcing and dying
nfttions, desperately battling against
the hosts of thr^e great Powers to
which help an.d reinforcement from
Stdtea now neutral will certainly
cotrlei should the decision b6 long^ de-
ferred, she pours out the blood of her
heroic subjects and wastes her dimin-
ishing substance in a hopeless strug-
gle that postpQnes but cannot alter the
fatal decree. Yet the doom of the
German Empire may become the de-
liverance of the German people if they
will betimes but seize and hold their
own. Leipsic began and Waterloo
achieved the emancipation of the
French people from the bloody, selfish
and sterile domination of the Corsican
Ogre. St. Helena made it secure.
Sedan Sent the little Napoleok sprawl-
ing and the statesmen of France in-
stantly established and proclaimed the
Republic. Will the Germans blindly
insist on having their Waterloo, their
•Sedan— their St. Helena, too? A
million Germans have been sacrificed,
a mlllio-n German homes are desolate.
Must other millions die and yet other
millions mourn before the people of
Germany take in the court of reason
'and human liberty their appeal from
th6 Imperial and military caste that
rushes them to their ruin?

They have their full Justification in
the incompetence and failure of their
rulers. German diplomacy and Ger-
man militarism have broken down.
The blundering Incapacity of the
40s

Kaiser's counselors and servants in
statecraft at Berlin and in foreign
t-apitals committed Germany to a war
Against the joined might of England.
France and Russia. Bismarck would
never have had it so. Before he let
the armies take the field, before he
gave Austria the " free hand," he
would have had England and Russia
by the ears, he would have Isolated
France, as he did in 1870. The old
Emperor, a man not above the com.-
mon in capacity, surpassed the wisdom
of his grandson in this, that he knew
better than to trust his own judgmisnt
and he was sagacious enough to call
great men to his aid. Wilhelm II.
was wretchedly served at Vienna by
an Ambassador blinded by Russo-
phobia, at St. Petersburg by another
who advised his home Government that
Russia would not go to war, and at
London by the muddling Lichnowskt,
whose first guesses were commonly
wron^ and his second too late to be
fierviceable. Germany literally forced
an alliahce for this war between
England and Russia, two Powers
often antagonistic in the past and
having now no common interest save
th6 curbing of Germany. The ter-
rible misjudgment of the General
Staff hurled Germany headlong Into
the pit that Incompetent diplomacy
had prepared. The Empire went to
war with three great nations able to
meet her with forces moro than
double her own.

Then the worth of that iron military
discipline and of the forty years of
'Ceaseless preparation to which Ger-
many had sacrificed so mufch of the
productive power of her people was
put to the test Again the colossal im-
perial machine broke down. It was
not through incompetence. The Ger-
man Army was magnificent in its
strength. In equipment, and in valor.
It was overmatched, it had attempted
the impossible. That was the fatal
liluhder. The first rush upon Paris

406

was Intended to be Irresistible; that
was the plan of the General Staff;
France crushed, Russia could be sent-
about her business. It was not ir-
resistible, It was checked, it was re-
pulsed. When the Invaders were
driven back from the Marno to the
Alsne and the Belgian frontier Ger-
many's ultimate defeat was registered
in the book of fate and heralded to the
watching world. Germany's battle line
has been forced back to where it stood
when it first encountered the French.
Calais • is freed from her menace,
Tannenberg was but an incident
to the swarming hordes of Russia.
What boots it if she enters Lodz,
If she seize Warsaw, what even
If by some unlocked for turn of for-
tune she again approach the walls of
Paris? KiTCHENEE's new million of
trained men will be in France before
the snows have melted in the Vosges,
and Russia is inexhaustible.

There is within the German view an
even more sinister portent. The
world cannot, will not, let German^
win in this war. With her dominating
all Europe peac6 and security would
vanish from the earth. A few months
ago the world only dimly comprehend-
ed Germany, now it knows her thor-
oughly. So if England, France and
Russia cannot prevail against her,
Italy, with her two millions, the sturdy
Hollanders, the Swiss, hard men in a
fight, the Danes, the Greeks and the
men of the Balkans Will come to their
aid and make sure that the work is
finished, once for all. For their own
peace and safety the nations must de-
molish that towering structure of mili-
tarism in the centr6,of Europe that has
become the world's danger-spot,, its
greatest menace.

The only possible ending of the war
Is through the defeat of Germany.
Driven back to her Rhiae strongholds,
she will offer a stubborn resistance.
Even with the Russians near or act-
ually in Berlin she would fight on,
407

But for what? Why? Because the
German people, the very people, are
resolved to get. themselves all killed
before the inevitable day of the en-
emy's triumph?. Not at all. The
weary men in the trenches and the
distresse^people merely obey the or-
ders g-iven by imperial and military
authority. For the men in those high
quarters defeat would be the end of
all. Desperation, with some possible,
admixture of blind confidence, will
continue the. war. But. why should the
German people make further sacrifice
of blood to save the pride and the
shoulder- straps of German official-
dom? It means a million more battle-
field grrayes. It-ineans frightful addi-
tioTis to the bill of costs and to the
harshness of the, terms. Since the
more dreadful ending fs in plain view,
why not force the better ending now?

But this is revolution. That may be
Bo; call It so. Definitions are useful,
they are not deterrent. Is there in all
history anV record of a whole people
rising against their rulers in the
midst of a great war? Let the his-
torians answer the question. Is it con-
ceivable that the loyal German peo-
ple, made one by the love of the
Fatherland and devoted to the ac-
complishment of the imperial ideals,
could be stirred to revolt while still
unconquered? That concerns the
prophets. We 'are concerned neither
with precedents nor with prophecy.
We have aimed here to make clear the
certainty of Germany's defeat and to
sht)w that if she chooses to fight to
the bitter end her ultimate and sure
overthrow will leave her bled to ex-
haustion, drained bt her resources, and
under sentence to penalties of which
the stubbornness of her futile resist-
ance will measure the severity. We
could wish that the German people,
seeing the light, might t^ko timely
measures to avert the calamities that
await them.

It may well 1)0 doubted that they
408

will stvo the H^rht. But have not the
men of German blood in this country
a duty to perform to their "beleaguered
brethren In the old home? Americans
of Gofman birth or cf German descent
should SCO and feel Uv^ trulh ,i,bout
the present position of Germany, thd
probability for the Hear, th^ certainty
for the remoter, future. At honje tho
GerftianB cqjinot ' know tJio whole
truth; it Ig rot permitted thern to''
know it It v/Ill be* unfraternal and
most cruel for German-Americans
further to keep tfee truth from them,
or to fail in thetr plain, duty to make
known to them ho-vV low the imperiaLl
and militaristic Ideal h&s fallen in the
world's esteem, and to bring them to
.understand that tho enemies they now
oorifroiit aro but the. first lino of civ-
Jlizatlcn'"3 defense* agtinst the menace'
of tho swori2 tliat forever rattles in
its scabfcarX Tlio sv/ord must so. tho
scabbard, too^ fitid th* ehiuing armor.
If th^ Germam* here; havo £\,t all tho
ear of tho Germans tliere, ..can they
not tell them k6? They have como
here to cccapa the everlasting: din of
war's trapping-*;- they have come to
fijid peace and quiet in a land of lib-
erty and law, where government rests
on tho consent of tho groverned, where
tha p3opIo hy their chosen representa-
tives, when there is a question of g-o-
Ing- into tha trencjieg to be slain, have
something to eay abotit it. Have they
ever trfed to get Into 'the heads of
their friends In the Fatherland some
Idea of the comforts. and advantages
of being governed in- that Vv-ay? In-
stead of vainly trj'ing to change the
Tvell-nifitured convictions of the Amer-
icans, why not labor for the conver-
sion of their brother Germans?

The State is Pow<^r,- said Teeitsciike.
He would have written Tennyson's
lino " The individual withers, the State
Is more and more." In the German
teaching the State *is" everything, to
the State the individual must sacrifice
everything. With us the State Is the

409

social organization by which men as-
sure to themselves the free play of In-
dividual genius, each man's right in
peace and security to work out his in-
dividual purposes. If the German-
Americans prize the privileges they
have enjoyed under our theory of the
State, ought they not to tell the Ger-
mans at home what it means for the
individual to he free from quasi-vas-
salage? There is. no ptjople on ear tit
more worthy to enjoy the blessings of
freedom than the Germans.' Germany
lias taken her place in the very front
of civilization, freed from the double
incubus of imperialism d.nd militarism
the German genius would have a
marvelous development. It Is not in
the thought of Germany's foes to
crush the German people, the world
would not let them be crushed. It has
for them the highest esteem, it will
acclaim the day when it can resume
friendly and uninterrupted relations
with them.. But the headstrong, mis-
guided, and dangerous rulers of Ger-
many are going to be called to stern
account, and the reckoning will be
paid by the German people in just the
proportion that they make common
cause with the blindly arrogant ruling
class. "When representative Ameri-
cans and men of peace like Dr. Eliot
and Andrew Cabnegie Irislst that there
can be no permanent peace until an
end has been made of German milir
tarism, sober-minded Germans, here as
well as In Germany, ought not to turn
a deaf ear to such voices, for they
speak the opinion of the world. The
bill of costs mounts frightfully with
every month's prolongation of the war
and the toll of human live§ is every
day ruthlessly taken. It may be a
counsel of unattainable perfection to
S3.y that the German people ought now
to end the war. But for their own
happiness, for their own homes, for
their Interests and their future, it Is
true. The truth of the counsel is un-^
conquerable. .

410

Roster of

The New York Times

Company

Adolph S. Ochs President

Charles R. Miller Vice-President

Julius Ochs Abler Vice-President

Arthur Hays Sulzberger Vice-President

Julius Ochs Abler ... Treasurer

Ben. C. Franck Secretary

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Adolph S. Ochs Charles R. Miller Ben. C. Franck

G. W. Ochs Oakes Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger

PUBLISHER

*Adolph S. Ochs

Executive Council

Abolph S. Ochs Charles R. Miller Carr V. Van Anda

Julius Ochs Abler Louis Wiley Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Assistants to the Publisher

Julius Ochs Abler Arthur Hays Sulzberger *Ben. C. Franck

*Kate L. Stone, Secretary to the Publisher

Secretaries and Clerks

ALICE M. JENKINS MAURA L. o'sULLIVAN C. R. SAFFORD

peter brown JOHN R. HOUSTON ANBREW JORDAN

JOHN o'bRIEN JOHN o'bONNELL ANNA CARROLL

J. bentley squier, jr.

Attorney

Alfred A. Cook, General Counsel
George Norris, Associate Attorney

• Twenty-five years or more with The Times.

411

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT

*Charles R. Miller, Editor-in-chief

RoLLO Ogden, Associate Editor

John H. Finley, Associate Editor

Editorial Staff

Henry E. Armstrong *E. A. Bradford John Corbin

Elmer Davis Edward M. Kingsbury *F. C. Mortimer

Frank D. Root Charles H. Grasty

NEWS DEPARTMENT

Carr V. Van Anda, Managing Editor

Frederick T. Birchall Assistant Managing Editor

Alden March Day News Editor

Osmund Phillips City Editor

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Joseph F. Tebeau Telegraph Editor

Wilson L. Fairbanks Assistant Telegraph Editor

John F. O'Neil Make-up Editor

H. J, Learoyd Assistant Make-up Editor

Ralph H. Graves Sunday Editor

Henry Irving Brock Assistant Sunday Editor

Charles M. Graves Editor Rotogravure Pictorial

Victor W. Talley Asst.Ed.RotogravurePictorial

Alfred D. Noyes Financial Editor

Franklin K. Sprague Assistant Financial Editor

*Henry Loewenthal Business Editor

Bernard Thomson Sports Editor

William J. Slocum Assistant Sports Editor

Clifford Smythe Book Review Editor

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Richard Aldrich Music Editor

Alexander Woollcott Dramatic Editor

Wilbur Finley Fauley Society Editor

Elizabeth Luther Cary Art Editor

Edward N. Dart . . . , Director Art Department

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Laurence V. Updegraff Editor Correspondence

Charles V. Vanderhoof Manager Syndicate News

Walter Littlefield Foreign Publications

Harry T. Smith Foreign Publications

*R. W. Welch American Publications

Jennie Welland Manager Library and Index

Thomas Bracken Manager News Index

Irving E. Pfeiffer Subject Index

Frederick Meinholz Manager Wireless Station

Richard V. Oulahan Manager Washington Office

Hal. H. Smith . Asst. Mgr. Washington Office

Ernest A. Marshall Manager London Office

Edwin L. James Manager Paris Office

• Twenty-five years or more with The Times.

412

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

News and Editorial Staff

*ABRAHAMS, MICHAEL B.
ACKERMAN, JOHN D.
ANDREWS, HENRY V.
AUSTIN, FREDERICK A.
BARCLAY, GEO. E.
BEAN, RODNEY
BECAN, JOHN
BELL, JEFFERSON G.
BERONOWSKI, ANDREW-
BLAKE, GEO. W.
BLANPIED, RALPH D.
BLYTHE, WALTER E.
BOND, F. FR.\ZER
BRADY, EDWARD
BRANNAN, DANA
BROADWELL, ARTHUR
BROWN, CYRIL
BROWN, JOHN
BROWN, PERCY
BURGESS, ARTHUR
BUTCHER, JESSE S.
CAMPBELL, JOHN R.
CASARIO, EUGENE
CHASE, W. B.
CHESTERTON, GEO. L.
CLARKE, HAZEL
CLARKE, VINCENT
COLLINS, WILLIAM
CONNERY, TIM
CORTESI, ELIZABETH
CORUM, MARTENE W.
CRANE, F. W.
CROUCH, H. C.
CURLEY, JOHN W.
DAVIDSON, CHARLES M.
DAWSON, JAMES
DAWSON, ROBERT P.
DAY, JOSEPH T.
DELANO, EDWIN F.
DE NARDO, ANTHONY
DE PUY, FRANK A.
DICKEY, CARL
DONLON, J. S.
DURANTY, WALTER
EATON, MALCOLM
EVERETT, ETHEL W.
FARDON, JAMES
FELD, ROSE C.
FELLEMAN, HAZEL
FINCH, TOLITA MAY

FISCHER, ELIZ. M.
FISKE, D. W.
FOLEY, MAURICE
FORD, COREY H.
FOX, ARTHUR
GLEASON, LILLIAN
GOBETZ, ARTHUR
GODDARD, PERCIVAL S.
GORDON, JOHN J.
GORMAN, HERBERT S.
GRANT, J. C.
GROVE, J. H.
HAGERTY, JAMES A.
HAGGERTY, MICHAEL F.
HALLIGAN, EDWARD
HAMBIDGE, C. G.
HAMEL, GASTON
HAMILTON, THOMAS C.
HARDING, JOHN W.
HARRIS, FRANCES D.
HARRISON, JAMES R.
HAYS, GENE
HEATH, ELIZ. M.
HEDDEN, GEORGIANA
HERTEL, H. H.
HINTON, HAROLD B.
HIRSCHEL, IRVING
HIRSCHEL, TOBIE
HOLLAND, JAMES
HOLME, LEONARD R.
HOYT, PHILIP D.
HUGHES, CHARLES F.
HUNTER, FRANK
HUNTINGTON, WM. R.
HUTCHISON, PERCY A.
IRWIN, JR., F. N.
IVERSON, REGINALD
JAEGER, FRED A.
JANNET, ADY
JOHNSTON, ALVA
JONES, WATKIN
KAUFMAN, GEO. S.
KEARNEY, AGNES
KEARNS, FRANK
KEENAN, WALTER M.
KELLY, MRS. F. F.
KELLY, JOHN
KEPPLE, ERNEST P.
KING, EARL
KLAUBER, EDWARD

KNOX, PURVES T.
KROLL, MORTIMER J.
KURTH, JR., OTTO
KURTZ, HENRY
LANE, MILTON
LARITY, THOMAS
EARNED, RICHARD M.
LAVIN, JOHN
LAWSON, WILLIAM E.
LEA, J. H.
LEWIS, HENRY N.
LINN, JR., THOMAS C.
LONG, E. JOHN
LOTT, ELLA K.
LYMAN, LAUREN D.
MaCNEIL, NEIL
MARSHALL, FRANCES W.
MARTIN, WALTER T.
MASON, JOSEPH
*MCCAHILL, W. J.
MCDONALD, ANNA
MCDONALD, GEORGE
MCDOWELL, R. K.
MCGINITY, LEO A.
MCGILL, FRED W.
MCMANUS, JOHN
MCSWEENEY, EDWARD
MICHAEL, C. R.
MILLAR, H. PERCY
MORAN, STEVE
MUELLER, LOGAN E.
MUENCH, FRED
MULLER, WILLIAM
NAINOR, ANDREW
NETZER, JACK
NIXON, WILSON K.
O'CONNELL, JOHN J.
o'cONNOR, F. J.
OWEN, JOHN
OWEN, RUSSELL D.
PHILIP, P. J.
PORTER, R. S.
PRAET, JAMES J.
RAE, BRUCE
RAUCH, MAY

RICHARDSON, WILLIAM D.
RIDDELL, BEATRICE
ROBINSON, F. H,
ROBINSON, JOHN E.
ROSENBERG, R.

* Twenty-five years or more with Tl^e Times.

413

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
News and Editorial Staff — Continued

ROSENTHAL, DELPHINE
ROWLAND, EDITH
RYAN, JOHN
SACKETT, WILLIAM E.
SAPIA, JANE
SCHLOSSER, WILLIAM
SCHOCH, WALTER
SCHUMANN, CHARLES
SCHWARTZ, SADIE
SHAPS, JACK
SNYDER, FRANCES
SOULE, H, P.
SPEARING, JAMES O.
SPEERS, L. C.
SPENCER, H. S.
STARK, LOUIS
STAUB, WILLIAM
STEFFEN, CHARLES
STEFFEN, J. HAL.

STEPHENS, DOLORES
STEWART, EDWARD J.
STRUSINSKI, NICHOLAS
SUETTER, BENJAMIN
SULLIVAN, JOS. F.
SWARTZ, ARTHUR
TAFT, MARY A.
TALLEY, TRUMAN H.
THOMPSON, C. W.
THORNE, VAN BUREN
TURPIN, RUFUS E.
VAN NESS, FRED A.
VULTEE, L. H.
WADE, MARGARET
WALL, FLORENCE
WALSH, LEONARD
WAMSLEY, WILBUR F.
WARN, W. A.
WATERS, JOSEPH

WEAVER, JOS. A.
WEBER, ABRAHAM
WELDON, M. L.
WHITE, EDITH
WHITNEY, C. H.
WIDLIZKA, ANTAN
WILKIE, ENID
WILL, ALLEN S.
WILLIAMS, FLORENCE E.
WILLIAMS, T. W.
WILLIAMSON, S. T.
WILSON, WILLIAM R.
WIMBROUGH, A. C.
WOOD, LEWIS
WRIGHT, JEAN
WRIGHT, WILLIAM C.
YERION, RUTH
YOUNG, JAMES C.
ZOLOTOW, SAMUEL

BUSINESS DEPARTMENT

*Louis Wiley, Business Manager

Edwin S. Friendly Assistant Business Manager

Hugh A. O'Donnell Bus. Manager Representative

B. T. Butterworth Advertising Manager

Harris H. Walker Assistant Advertising Manager

Frank W. Harold Advertising Censor

Arnold Sanchez Manager Credit Department

James M. Kirshner Manager Charge Department

R. Alexander Lawe Manager Bookkeeping Department

William W. Miller Classified Advertising Manager

Irma Kory Assistant Classified Advertising Mgr.

♦Charles A. Flanagan Circulation Manager

Louis O. Morny Subscription Manager

William Johnson Chief Circulation Inspector

Michael A. O'Reilly Chief Circulation Bookkeeper

William A. Hurley Manager Annex Publication Office

Edward H. Taylor Supervisor Branch Offices

Edward B. Wells ?vlgr. Times Building Publication Office

William Kean Manager Downtown Office

A. H. Mandelberg Manager Harlem Office

Chester M. Goode Manager Brooklyn Office

Bernard Van Camp Manager Messenger Department

Sadie L. McNulty Incoming Mail Department

Anna Groh Outgoing Mail Department

Mildred L. Bischof Manager File Department

Anna Kottman Circulation Manager Index

Katherine Maguire Chief Telephone Operator

♦ Twenty -five years or more with The Times.

414

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

Business Department — Continued

ADAMS, WALTER C.
AGOADO, JOSEPH
ALLUISI, GEORGE
APPLEGATE, GERTRUDE G.
ARDELL, HERBERT S.
ASTON, HENRY H.
BABCOCK, FRANCIS M.
BACHRAN, JOHN E.
BACON, MRS. HATTIE
BALL, E. SULLIVAN
BANGS, GILBERT M.
BANKS, HARRIET D.
BARNETT, GEORGE F.
BASILOWITZ, MICHAEL
PAXTER, IRVING C.
BECK, AUGUSTUS
BEERE, SEYMOUR
BELL, ROBERT
BENDER, WILLIAM
BENNETT, MAE V.
BERGEN, MARGARET
BERGEN, PHILIP
BERGER, HELEN
BERKERY, ROSE
BIGELOW, BURT M.
BIGGS, RICHARD
BISSETT, WILLIAM
BLOCH, LENA
BOEHM, HULDA M.
BOLEI, EVELYN
BOND, FRANK
BRADLEY, MARGARET
BRENNEN, CATHERINE
BRENNEN, CHARLES J.
BRENNEN, MAY
BROSNAN, AGNES
BROWN, HARRY W.
BRUMER, FRANCES
BUCHOLZ, CLAIRE
BURKE, ANNA
BURNES, MARJORIE
BZENAK, ANNA
CAHILL, JOSEPH
CAMERON, WILSON
CANFIELD, THOMAS
CANSE, EDWARD
CARMODY, AGNES
CARVILLE, ARTHUR J.
CAVANAGH, JAMES T.
CHESTON, ESTHER
CLARK, ELIZABETH

CLARK, GRACE
CLARK, HELEN M.
CLARK, MARGARET E.
CLARK, NOBERN C.
CLARKE, JAMES J.
COCHRANE, ROBERT C.
COHEN, GEORGE
COLLIER, EDNA
COLLINS, HAZEL
CONNELL, ANNA
CONNELL, MARY
CONNORS, HELEN
COOPE, JOSEPHINE
COSTOSA, RAYMOND
COX, HARRY F.
COX, HARRY S.
CUNNINGHAM, FLORENCE
CUSACK, GEORGE J.
DALGIN, BEN
DALTON, GERALD J.
DALTON, MRS, G. J.
DALY, JOSEPHINE
DAMON, ALBERT H.
DAVIS, PAUL
DE COSTA, LUCILLE
DE GWECK, GRACE
DELANEY, WINIFRED
DE MARRAIS, JOSEPH A.
DEMPSEY, KATHERINE
DENNY, VICTOR J.
DE ZAYAS, HENRIETTA
DIX, ADELAIDE B.
DOESSERECK, WILLIAM
DONAHUE, CLAIRE
DONNELLY, ELIZABETH
DONOVAN, KATHERINE
DORGAN, JOHN
DOWLEY, MAY
DU BLAN, CARMEN
DUFFY, JOHN T., JR.
DULLAGHAN, DOROTHY
DUNN, HUGH P.
DUNN, MARY A.
EGAN, CATHERINE
EISEL, THERESE C.
ELFERS, HERBERT
EMERIC, RAYMON
ENGLANDER, BLANCHE
ERB, CATHERINE
EVANS, H. WILSON
FANCIULLI, ROMOLA

FARRELL, THOMAS
FINNEY, CHARLES A.
FITZMAURICE, ANNA
FOOTE, ANNA
FOOTE, IRENE
FOX, ELEANOR
FRANK, MINNIE
FRY, BERNARD H.
FRYER, THOMAS H.
FURY, JOSEPH
FYBUSH, ELBERT
GALL, CLARA
GALLAGHER, CATHERINE
GAW, JOSEPH
GOERICKE, HARRY
GOLD, EVA

GOLDFINE, JEANNETTE
GOMBAR, FRANK
GORDON, HELEN
GRAHAM, ROSE
GRETSCHEL, CHARLES
GRISWOLD, FRANK B.
GROSS, EDWARD A.
HAGEN, MABEL
HAHN, GEORGE M.
HAINES, EDNA
HALLIGAN, FLORENCE
HAMBERGER, FLORENCE
HAMILTON, JOHN K.
HAMMERMAN, ELIZABETH
HANDBURY, MILDRED
HARLAN, ANNA S.
HARTMAN, ALICE
HERLEHY, FRANCES
HESLIN, MATTHEW J.
HETFIELD, JAMES
HICKEY, MARGARET
HICKEY, ROSE
HOLBERT, A. RUGGLES
HOLLAND, JOHN
HOLLOWAY, MURIEL
HOLMES, AGNES
HOOPER, DUDLEY R.
HORAN, ALICE
HORAN, MRS. J. J.
HORAN, WINIFRED
HUBBARD, CARLETON S.
HUGHES, MICHAEL
HULL, MRS. GERTRUDE
HUNT, EDWARD
HUTCHINSON, LAURA C.

415

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
Business Department — Continued

HYNES, IRENE
IZAGUIRRE, LORETTA
JACKSON, CHARLES J.
JAEGER, HENRY
JAGELER, JOHN
JAROS, CHARLES
JOHNSON, ANNA W.
JOHNSON, JOHN
JOHNSON, MRS. MATILDA
JONAS, STELLA
JUDGE, MARY G.
KALB, AUBREY
KAUFER, OLIVE
KAUFMAN, HENRY
KENNEY, HUGH J.
KING, WILLIAM W.
KINGSMORE, HOWARD P.
KIRCHER, BERTHA B.
KIVLAN, FRANK J.
KRAMPETZ, HELEN
KRASNER, ROSE
LACEY, ROSE
LAURI, ROSE
LEAHY, THOMAS
LECK, ANNA
LEDBETTER, WILLIAM
LEEMAN, GEORGE
LEIPSIG, ROSE
LIGHTENBERG, ISAAC
LIVINGSTON, BELLE
LOCKARD, MRS. RAY
LOW, ETHEL
LYNCH, WILLIAM
MCALOON, JOHN
MCAVOY, META
MCCANN, LUCINDA
MCCOY, JOSEPH
MCDERMOTT, MARY
MCDOWELL, WM. J.
MCGAHAN, FLORENCE
MCGOWN, HENRY
MCGRAM, HELEN
MCGRANN, ALFONSO
MCGRAW, WILLIAM
MCGUINNESS, JOHN
MCINTOSH, MCQUEEN
MCINTYRE, EWEN C.
MCKENNA, JOS. L.
MCMAHON, JOHN
MCNAMARA, ALBERT
MCNAMARA, ELIZABETH

MCNAMEE, FRANCIS
MCNEILL, JOHN
MCNULTY, FRANK L.
MacDONALD, JOSEPH
MAKER, BEATRICE L.
MAHNKEN, MRS. A.
MAINARDY, FRANK
MALONE, RICHARD A.
MALONEY, HARRY
MARABLE, JUNIUS
MARKS, SARA
MASSEY, GEORGIANNA L.
MATTIMORE, ANNA
•"MAUBORGNE, EUGENE C.
MAYER, MARGARET
MEIERS, WALTER
MERZ, HARRY
MEYERS, FLORENCE
MEYERS, GERTRUDE
MEYERS, HELEN
MOFFETT, MARY
MONT, ROBERT
MOONEY, FLORENCE
MOOREHOUSE, ISA J.
MORGAN, ALFRED
MUDSE, ANTHONY J.
MUHLKER, HERBERT C.
MULCAHY, MARY
MULLANEY, MARIE A.
MUNROE, ALBERT E.
NAUGHTON, WILLIAM J.
NEEL, WILLIAM H.
NEUMANN, ANTHONY
NICHOLS, GERTRUDE E.
NICOLL, EMANUEL
NIEMAN, CHAUNCY W.
NILSON, FRANK
NOBLE, WALTER H.
NOLAN, WARREN C.
NORTON, ELLEN
o'bRIEN, LILLIAN
O'CONNELL, THOMAS
o'cONNOR, JOSEPHINE
o'lEARY, JOSEPH R.

o'neill, albert
o'neill, DONALL

o'neill, JAMES
OLDS EN, MINA
OLMSTEAD, ALFRED H.
PACCIONE, MARY F.
PATTERSON, MARGARET

PETERS, CARL
PHILLIPS, HARRY S.
PICCIRILLO, MAE
PORTENAR, ABRAHAM J.
POWERS, RAY M.
QUINNELL, EDNA
RABEY, DOROTHY
REDMOND, JOHN
REED, LORA H.
REGAN, HELEN
REGAN, THOMAS D.
REILLY, HELEN
REILLY, JOHN H.
REILLY, JOHN
REINHARDT, LEON
RENNEISEN, MILDRED J.
REYNOLDS, HELEN
RICHARDS, VERNON
RIORDAN, JULIA
RITTER, HARRY E.
ROBINSON, JAMES J.
RODGERS, DAVID S.
RODRIGUEZ, GERTRUDE
ROSENBERG, NELLIE
ROSS, ADOLPH R.
ROTHMUND, CATHERINE
RUGGER, MAY
RYAN, HELEN
RYAN, JOHN A.
SAMBORN, JOHN A.
SANDLER, JACOB K.
SANSEVERINO, GODFREY
SAUSE, EMMA
SCHATTELES, SAMUEL
SCHERB, LILLIAN
SCHULTZ, P. RICHARD
SCHWAB, ELIZABETH
SEIDLER, CARLTON
SERVER, EDWARD A.
SETZER, ABRAHAM M.
SEWING, ALMA
SHAW, SAMSON H.
SHEEHAN, KATHERINE
SHEEHY, MABEL E.
SHEPPARD, STANLEY R.
SLOCUM, WILLIAM W.
SMITH, CHARLES
SMITH, CLARA M.
SMITH, CLEVELAND G.
SMITH, EDITH
SMITH, HARRY W.

* Twenty-five years or more with The Times.

416

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

Business Department — Continued

SMITH, LAURA M.
SiMITH, THOMAS M.
STANDISH, CLIFFORD
STEERS, ROBERT
STORER, ELEANOR M.
SUCHARIPA, FRANCES
SUFFIN, SIMON
SULLIVAN, JAMES
SUPPLE, JULIA
SUTCLIFF, BEATRICE M.
SVEC, FRANK
SWORMSTED, WOODBURN
TAUSTINE, IRVING
THOMPSON, CAREY R.

THORNE, FLORENCE
TIMMONS, MARY
TROUT, MILDRED F,
TRUEPER, JOHN H.
UBERROTH, VIOLA
VAN SLYKE, WINFRED
VAN WENKLE, FANNY D.
VOS, ANDREW V.
WALSH, F. BAGLEY
WALSH, RAYMOND
WALTERS, ANNA
WARD, ETHEL
WEINBERG, FLORENCE
WEISHAAR, AUGUST

WEIS, RUTH
WELCH, ESTELLE
WELLS, PAULINE R.
WHITEHOUSE, LOUISE M.
WIGGINS, MRS. DONNA
WILD, MATILDA
WILLIAMS, WILLIAM
WILSTRUP, ALEXIS
WOLFF, HEDWIG
ZANDER, STANLEY C.
ZANK, DAVID
ZUCHTMANN, VERA

MECHANICAL DEPARTMENTS

Charles F. Hart, Superintendent
Lewis Cochrane, Assistant Superintendent

Annex Building and Mechanical Department

Walter S. Barnes Superintendent Annex Building

Walter E. Palmer Chief Electrician

John Connell . Chief Stationary Engineer

JuDSON DuNLOP Master Carpenter

James McCauley Chief Watchman

Glenn Donaldson Head Porter

William Durrant Foreman Machinist

Elsie Taussig Chief Stencil Department

ADAMS, CLAUDIE CUMMINGS, GEORGE FRANCIS, RUPERT

BELL, DEE CURCIO, LOUIS FREEMAN, LILLIAN

BLAKE, PERCY CURTIN, PATRICK GALLAGHER, MARY

ELANKEN, CHARLES DALTON, MARY GEEHAN, JOSEPH

BLUMENFIELD, ELSIE DALY, FLORENCE GEOGHAN, PATRICK

BLUNT, RICHARD 'DART, JAMES GORDON, PETER C.

BOLDEN, JOHN DE NICOLA, HARRY GRADEL, ELIZABETH

CALLAHAN, LILLY DINSENBACHER, JOSEPH GRAVES, ROBERT

CHANDLER, LEDGER DOUGHERTY, JOHN HANSBURY, CLIFFORD

CHISHOLM, WILLIAM DU BOIS, JESSIE HARD, CATHERINE

CHURCHMAN, GEORGE EIDENBERG, TILLIE HART, KATE

CLARK, AGNES ELLIS, LULU HEILIG, MARGARET

COLEMAN, JAMES ENGLISH, WILLIS HEINS, ALICE

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WHEELER, FREDERICK
WHITTAKER, JOSEPH
WORMSER, LEON

GENERAL DEPARTMENTS

LuciEN Franck Purchasing Agent

Carl Hotopp Assistant Purchasing Agent

Edward A. Hegi Cashier

Mildred C. Smith Assistant Cashier

William M. Jackson Manager Personnel Department

Walter A. Madigan Manager Restaurant

ALVAREZ, JOHN

brondolo, tony
brown, william
colgan, william d.
de pass, adrian

FAHERTY, MARY A.
FLASCH, SYLVIA
FONTANA, LOUIS
FOYE, HARRY, JR.
FOYE, HENRY P.
GEHRIG, GEORGE

GERSHENSON, L.
HEGEDUS, HENRICH
JACOBUS, PHEBE
JUPITER, EDWARD
KEARNEY, CATHERINE
LEMMER, ANNA
LORENZEN, ELIZABETH A.
MCDERMOTT, JOHN
MCNEELEY, MARY
O'SHEA, WILLIAM J.
SCHNURRER, CHRIS.

SCHUTTINGER, KATHERINE
SHEEHAN, KITTY
SMITH, B.

TORCHIO, LAWRENCE
TORINO, JOSEPH
TUCKER, KENNETH
WAKELEY, DELBERT
WALTERS, HILLIS
WEAVER, MRS. JOSEPHINE
WINSTON, ANDREW
ZIMMERMAN, ALBERT

425

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

CURRENT HISTORY, MIDWEEK PICTORIAL AND
WAR VOLUMES

George W. Ochs Oakes Editor and Manager

Editorial Staff

BLYTHE, WALTER E. PRESTON, THOS. B. WALSH, MATTHEW J.

DUFFIELD, J. W. SHUMAN, EDWIN L. WATERBURY, IVAN C. '

KURTH, OTTO SNOW, DR. F. H. WHITE, CAPT. MICHAEL A. E.

Business Office

Kresge, Hqmer D Manager

Burgess, Frank T Sales Manager

Hechelheim, Louis Bookkeeper

ADAMS, ARTHUR R. EDMUNDS, L. M. LYNCH, G. M.

ALBERT, MIRIAM ERGER, LOUISE MCELDARRY, MAY

ALLAN, MURIEL ESPOSITA, MARGARET MELLINGER, EDW. D.

ANDERSON, HILDA EZECHEL, KATHERINE MORRIS, KATHERINE

BARRETT, ADELE V. FECHNER, LEON NEUMANN, J. A.

BERGLING, ANNA FERNEEKES, ELSA M. o'bRIEN, MARION

BLOOMER, W. FINGER, SHIRLEY o'sULLIVAN, MARGARET

BOLSTAD, EDW. FINKHOUSER, FRED A. QUINN, S. T.

BOTNER, PAULINE FINKHOUSER, JAS. A. RODENBERG, G.

BROWN, WM. M. GREEN, CHAS. J. ROSE, LILY

BURKETT, R. M. HALL, GERTRUDE SALCEDO, WM.

BURNS, EDW. M. JACKSON, MORRIS SUSSMAN, MOE

CONVISER, ELLA LAMB, VINCENT D. TALIMER, BERNARD

CORRELL, JOHN I. LASHER, MORRIS VRADENBURG, ARTHUR

CRAIG, LILLIAN LAUBER, SAMUEL WARNOCK, M. C.

DICKINSON, CARRIE LEVY, ROBT. SAM'l WEISS, SAMUEL

DONAHUE, ELIZABETH LOCKLEY, ROSE

Louis O. Morney
alden, john
ames, richard

ANNALIST

Edward G. Rich, Editor

cullum, welcome h.
harms, august a.

Manager Business Office

POLLOCK, JOHN

WIDE WORLD PHOTO DEPARTMENT

Charles M. Graves, Manager
Jules Dumas Sales Manager

CANFIELD, JOHN
DEVLIN, JAMES
GLUCKMAN, RAE
GOTTLEIB, GERALD
LEVY, ARTHUR

LUBBEN, PAUL
METZGER, JOHN F.
NESENSOHN, C. D.
NESENSOHN, JOHN A.
NEWTON, WILLIAM

O MEARA, JAMES
PEYROULET, JOHN
ROSE, RICHARD
STERN, NATHAN
TAYLOR, M. M.

426

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY

TIDEWATER PAPER MILLS COMPANY

Brooklyn, N. Y.

Adolph S. Ochs President

Arthur Hays Sulzberger Vice-President and Treasurer

Ben. C. Franck Secretary

Arthur F. Allen General Manager

John B. West Superintendent

Robert O. Sternberger Plant Engineer

Irwin H. Copeland Pulp Expert

A. F. McCoy Chemist

F. P. Ashworth Purchasing Agent

W. S. Chamberlain Cashier

A. E. Davies Master Mechanic

A. Mercier Chief Millwright

John J. Lee Chief Electrician

Wm. Brown Chief Stearn Engineer

Van a. Seeber Boss Machine Tender

Wm. Cole Boss Machine Tender

P. J. Kilawee Boss Machine Tender

H. Baker Beater Engineer

F. E. Vining Beater Engineer

D. J. Murphy Beater Engineer

L. J. Walz Foreman Shipping Room

Geo. a. Leavitt Yard Superintendent

barney ALFONZA jean DeCARLE THOS. ILLINGWORTH

J. BAJGERT EDW. DeLUCCA JOHN JACKAS

THOS. BATES JOS. C. DENNINGER J. JANEWITCH

M. BEKAN JOHN DEVENEY CHARLES JOHNSON

FRED BLAKE GEORGE DOLL JOHN JONES

CARL BOND JOHN DONOVAN STEVE KARANECKY

HUGH BOYLE RICHARD DONOVAN GUS KEMPF

EDW. BRATT JULIUS DWIGHT STENLI KEIRMARSKI

CHRIS BREGENZER M. DZYOVNES JOHN KENNY

E. 8. BRINKLEY THOS. J. EVERS FRANK KINGSTON
ARTHUR BROWN FRANK FABER T. KINGSTON
ARTHUR F. BROWN THOS. FEWER WALTER KONAPACKI
THOS. BROWN M. FOGARTY STANLEY KURARSKY
J. CAPEN PETER FRAGENT MOSES LANCTO
ALEX CLARK VINCENZO FRAGNITO PETER LANGMAN
THOS. COCHRAN WALTER FREDERICKSON M. LINDEMANN
JOHN CORLISS JAMES GAIGOL LEON MCDOUGAL
ROBERT CORNWALL JAS. GALLANAUGH FRANK MCGEENEY
T. COSTENO ROCCO GERVASE DANIEL MCLOON
JOHN COUGHLIN THOMAS GIBBONS A. MAELES

GUS CARLSON JAMES GRANT S. MAESTR

PATRICK DALEY J. GRAVES E. M. MASKELL

THOS. DALEY IGNATZ GREGOR GEORGE MAYHEW
JAS. W. DAVIS ROBERT HAMMINGTON FAHECK MEHMED

J. E. DAVIS HENRY J. HITT CHAS. MERKELS

ROSTER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY
Tidewater Paper Mills Company — Continued

L. C. MERRITT

JOHN MILLER
HENRY MULLEN
M. NADLER
CHRIS NAGEL
GEORGE NEWBY
EDW. NORDENBERG
PETER OSMANSKI
JAMES PETERSON
T. PETTONE
JOS. PITTULE
STEVE POLICKEL
CHARLES PROSSER
F. RHOOP
JNO. RIORDAN

BENJ. ROSS
A. J RUDOLPH
ALFRED RUEL
ALBERT SAGATAS
AUGUST SANDSTROM
AUGUST SCEMEL
JOHN SCHICK
CARL SCROXTON
E. F. SEEMS
GEORGE SEILER
FRANK SHIMSAW
P. J. SIMON
GEORGE SLATER
ORVILLE SLATER
T. STANKOWITZ

HARRY STRINGER

NICK TROICKY

GEORGE TURNER

T. VELCH

J. WALSH

D. WARD

L. W. WHETSTONE

0. WHITMAN

A. T. WILLIAMS

JOHN WILLE

T. WILLISITISKI

1. WYEROSKI
JOHN WYZLINSKI

428

INDEX

*' Abbey, Arthur M.," 349
Adams, Henry, 76; "Education

of Henry Adams," 'jG
Advertiser^ The, 390
Advertising, 26, 192, 193, 219 et

seq.y 23S, 317, 319 et seq., 370,

392, 402
Albany Evening Journal, 3, 4, 3 1
"All the News That's Fit to

Print," 197, 198, 199, 212
Alloway, Harry, 180
Annalist, The, 328
Antipathy to Times, 260 et seq.
Anti-Saloon League, 255
Appomattox Courthouse, battle of,

SI .

Arctic, disaster, 35, 36
Arthur, Chester A., 152
Associated Press, 43, 179, 230, 241,

367, 385
Astor, John Jacob, 97
Atherton, Gertrude, 378
Aviation, development of, 287 et

seq.; prizes, 288, 289

Baltimore American, The, 351,
Barnum, P. T., 10
Beck, James M., 338, 339
Beecher, Henry Ward, 61, 124
Behl, Private Harold J., 369
Bennett, James Gordon, 7, 8, 9, 10,

21, 63, 77, 79
BernstorfF, German ambassador to

U.S., 361
Bigelow, John, 134, 140; 1869, 81,

83; 82
Birchall, F. T., 364
Blaine, James G., 128, 131, 150,

151

Blanket sheets, 6

Board of Supervisors, New York,

1869, 90
Bolsheviki, Russian, 355
Book reviews, 38, 213 et seq.
Borah, Senator, 382
Bradley, Lieut. William, 369

Brest-Litovsk, 355

Briand, Premier, 386

Brisbane, Albert, il

Brisbane, Arthur, ii

British "White Paper," 337, 338

Brook Farm, 10

Bryan, William Jennings, 74, 226,

248, 249, 252
Bryant, William CuUen, 82
Buchanan, James, 37
Bull Run, battle of, 55
Burgess, John W., 339
Burns, George H., 36
Burnside, General, 57
Business policy of Times, 3 10 et seq.

Cabell, southern orator, 31
Cable, ocean, 37, 43, 119, 162,

163, 164, 231, 283
Campaign Times, 24
Capital of Times, xv, 17, 27, 169,

170, 185, 191, 193
Caricatures, 64
Carson, Major J. M., 377
Cartoons, 130, 196
Cary, Edward, xiv, 73, 78, 137,

169,182, 376 _
Censorship, American, 368
Century, The, 211
Chamberlain, Senator, 354
Chandler, Zachariah, 135
Charities fostered by Times, 304

et seq.
Chattanooga Times, The, Adolph S.

Ochs, publisher of, in 1896,

178
Chesterton, G. K., 339
Chicago Daily News, 390
Chicago Evening Post, The, 288
Chicago Record- Herald, The, 290
Chicago Tribufie, The, 275, 284,

.382, 390
Christmas contributions, 304
Circulation of Times, xviii, 26, 27,

64, 118, 169, 203, 211, 245,

246, 307> 3I0» 315, 389, 402

429

INDEX

Civil War, 14, 16, 46, 48 et seq.y 84,

263
Clark, Champ, 250, 251
Clemenceau, Georges, 367
Cleveland, Grover, 154, 155 et seq.y

171, 189
Collier's Weekly y 308
Columbia School of Journalism,

365- .
Commercial Cable Company, 285
Confederacy, southern, sympathy

of New York papers with,

Conkling, 144

Connolly, Richard B., 90, 95, 97,

98, 102, 103, 106, 126
Conservatism of TimeSy 266 et

seq.
Cook, Dr. Frederick, 291 et seq.
Cooper, Peter, 96, 100
"Copperheads," 68, 71, 72
Courier and Enquirer y 4, 11, 13
Court calendars, reports of, 210
Cox, James M., 259, 374, 381
Croker, 86

Crounse, Lorenzo, 58
Cuban question, 225
Current History Alagaziney 328
Curtiss airplane, 288
Czernin, Count, 367

Dana, Charles A., 6, yjy 94, 95,
161, 203, 199

Davidson, E. Mora, 184

Davis, Jefferson, 66, 71

Davis, John W., 259

Davis, Oscar King, 361

De Forest wireless, 283

Democratic Party, 9, 32; and Gold
standard, 74, 160; National
Convention in San Francisco,
1920, 382; policies of, 253, et
seq.; and Sun and Herald, 9

Dernburg, Dr. Bernhard, 339

Dithmar, E. A., 376

Douglas, Stephen A, 50

Dunnell, E. G,, 377

Dyer, Henry L., 168

Editorials, 2l8; during World
War, 335; editorial attacks,
22, 23

Eidlitz, C. L.^W., 32s

Eliot, Charles W., 339

Ely, Alfred, 182, 184^

England, relations with, 160

Erie Railroad conspiracy, 82, 98

Espionage Act, 368

European news, 24, 25, 38, 275,

279 et seq.
Evening Maily New York, 235
Everett, Edward, 61
Expenses of Times, 26, 63, yj, 240,

389

Federal Reserve Act, 252, 258

Field, Cyrus W., 100

Fillmore, Millard, 29

Financial News in TimeSy 217,

Fire report in TimeSy 25

Fisk, James, Jr., 75, 82, 100,

126
Flint, Charles R., 181
Foch, Marshal, 366
Foord, John, 98, 106, 130 et seq.,

150
Forbes, John }A., 149
Foster, John W., 162
Fourieristic Socialism, 10, 79
Fowler, Robert Ludlow, 339
Fox, Mortimer J., 327
Franco-Prussian War, 37, 123
Free Silver, 74, 178
Free-Soil Democrats, 15
Free-Soil Whigs, 14
Freedman's Bureau Bill, 6G

Garfield, James A., 144 et seq.

Garrett, Garet, 361

Garrison, William Lloyd, 48

Gatling gun, 60

German propaganda, 187, 189,

262, 340 et seq.
German "White Paper," 337, 338
Gibbs, Philip, 293, 361
Gilder, Richard Watson, 211
Globe y New Yorky 224
Gold Democratic ticket, 74
Golden jubilee of Times, 1901,

243
Gould, Jay, 75, 82, 100, 148
Grant, U. S., General, 39, 56, 65,

82, 125, 149
Grasty, Charles H., 362, 378
Greaves, Arthur, xv, 274, 376

430

INDEX

Greeley, Horace, 3, 4, 8, 9, lo, ii,
13, 21, 22, 32, 59, 69, 70, 80,
83, 85, 121, 197

Green, Andrew H., 112, 126

Hall, A. Oakey, 89, 93, 95, 100,

102, 109, 115
Halsey, Francis W., 213
Hamilton, Claude, 288
Hanna, Mark, 160
Harding, Warren G., 373, 381,

384
Harper, Fletcher, Jr., 27
Harper s Weekly, 93, 95
Hart, Charles F., 364
Hartley, Marcellus, 184
Havemeyer, William F., 112
Hayes, Rutherford B., 131 et seq.
Headlines, display, 39, 106
Hearst, William Randolph, 294
Herald, New York, 7, 8, 9, 12, 19,

22, 26, 33, 34, 35, 36, 50, 64,

76, 117, 197, 200, 236, 241,

292, 323, 390, 400
Hewitt, Abram S,, 136
Hill, David B., 158
Hill, Frederic Trevor, 299
Hoffman, John T., 89, 95
Honor Roll of Times, 369
Hosmer, F. L., 377
*'Hubbell, G. M.," 349
Hughes, Charles E,, 384
Hurlburt, William Henry, 45

Income of Times, 118, 156
Index, New York Times, 328
Irish question, 12, 262
Italy, War in 1859, 41, 44

Jackson, Andrew, 257

James, Edwin L., 362

James, Lionel, Capt., 283

Janvier, Thomas A., 298

Japan, in World War, 359

"Jasper," 54 _

Jennings, Louis J., 84 et seq., 105 et

seq., 128, 130
Jerome, Leonard W., 27, 59, 81
Joffre, General, 28, 368
John Brown's Raid, 49
Johnson, Andrew, 15, 68, 73
Johnston, Albert Sidney, 41
Johnston, W. E., 42

Jones, George, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 17,

18, 19, 26, 27, 65, 77, 80, 81,

83, 92, 100, 102, 116, 126, 129,

149, 164; death, 166
Jones, Gilbert, 168
Journal, New York, 196, 200, 222,

224, 231, 232, 237, 238, 239,

390
Journalism, history of, 79
Jubilee Supplement of Times, vii

Kansas-Nebraska Act, 32
Kilmer, Sergeant Joyce, 369
Knapp, C. W., 376
Kohisaat, Herman H., 180
Kossuth, Louis, 28, 29, 40

La Prensa, 327

League of Nations, 261, 371, 378

Le Hir, George, 362

Lee, Robert E., 39, 56, 58, 59, 70

Letters from Readers, 217, 235

Liberty Loan Committee, 303

Lincoln, Abraham, 16, 49, 62, 65,

66, 299
Lloyd George, David, 300
Loewenthal, Henry, xv, 274
London Daily Chronicle, ij^, 293 ^

359
London Daily Mail, 360
London Daily Telegraph, 290
London Times, 42, 84, 244, 275 et

seq.
Ludendorff, 366
Lusitania, 344, 352, 353, 364
Lynch, Rev. Dr. Frederick, 337

Mackenzie, Andrew C, 325
"Malakoff" (Dr. W. E. Johnston),

42, 44
Manhattan Elevated Railway

Company, 148
Manning, Major William Sinkler,

369
Marconi, 277, 278
Market reports, 209
Marshall, Ernest, 378
Matin (Paris), 275
Maverick, Augustus, vii, 6, 14,

20, 23, 36, 47
McAdoo, William G., 259
McAneny, George, 375
McCall, John A., 160

431

INDEX

McClure, S. S., 209
McDowell, General, 55
McKinley, William, 226, 243
Meade, General, 56
Mercury, New York, 178
Miller, Charles R., xiii, 137, 150,

161, 169, 181, 182, 194, 254,

342, 347, 350, 351
Miller, Warner, 158
Morgan, Christopher, 1 1
Morgan, E. B., 17, 18, 104, 128
Morgan, J. P. & Co., 189
Mormons, 41

Morning Telegraph, The, 178
Moyer, G. B., 378
"Mugwump" campaign, 155

Nation, The, 78 ^

Neanderthal Socialism, II

New Harmony, 10

New York City, historical articles
on, 298; government of, 7$;
politics, 86 et seq., 89, no

New York Life Insurance Com-
pany, 164

New York Printing Company, 92

New York Times Publishing Com-
pany, 169, 184, 185, 348

News-gathering, 274 et seq.

Nivelle, General, 368

Norris, John, xiv, 377

North American Review, 77

North German Lloyd Steamship
Company, 227, 228

NorthclifFe, Lord, 275, 349

Norwell, Caleb C, 83

O'Brien, James, 102, 103

Ochs, Adolph S., 6, 172, 178 et seq.,

203 et seq, 254, 347, 389
Ogden, RoUo, 376
Oneida Community, 10
O'Rourke, Matthew J., 182
Oulahan, Richard V., 378

Paine, J. H., 377

Palmer, A. Mitchell, 259

Paper, cost, 26, 375

Paris Exposition edition of Times

1900, 240
"Park Trench" scheme of Liberty

Loan Committee, 303

Parker, Alton B,, 249
Parkin, Dr. George R., 278
Payne, George Henry, 79
Peace Conference, 378
Peary, Admiral, 291 et seq.
Personal journalism, 162
Retain, General, 368
Petit Parisien, 209
Peverelly, T. L., 376
Philadelphia Record, 236
Phillips, abolitionist, i860, 49
Phillips, Barnet, 377
Pictorial Supplement of Times,

212, 329
Pierce, Private Edward B., 369
Plumb, J. B., 17
Political news, 296 et seq.
Post, George B., 165
Press, New York, 223
Price of Times, 27, 169, 233, 239
Prohibition, 269
Pulitzer, Joseph, 161, 195

Radicalism in America, 264 et seq.
Railroad, use of in journalism, 8
Raymond, Henry J., vii, 3 et seq.,
II et seq., 14, 26 et seq., 39, 48
et seq., 55, 56, 65 et seq., 71,
74. 77. 78, 358
Recorder, New York, 182
Reick, William C, xv, 274
Reid, John C, 123, 132, 137, 139,

151. 156
Republic (White Star Liner), 284
Republican Party, 15, 16, 32, 253

et seq.
Restoration of Times, 1896- 1900,

175 et seq.
Richardson, Albert D., 84
Roosevelt, Theodore, 149, 249,

258, 296, 300, 340
Root, Frank D., 147
Ruggles, Francis B., 17
Russo-Japanese War, 276, 283

St. John, Daniel B., 17

Saturday Book Review, 213 et seq.
Schiff, Jacob H., 339
Schuyler, Montgomery, 377
Scott, Winfield, 19, 29, 30
Selden, Charles A., 362, 378
Semi-weekly Times, 24

432

INDEX

Senate, U. S,, inquisition of Times

in 1915, 345, 351
"Sensational" journalism, 234
Seward, William H., 16, 49
Shepard, George, 84
Ship Purchase Bill, 345, 346
Simonton, James W., 41
Sinn Fein, 187, 341
Size of page of Times, 371; of issue,

27, 370
Slavery, 7, 14, 31, 48 et seq.
Sloane, William Milligan, 339
Socialism, 268

Spanish War, 226 et s^q.; 238
Speeches reported in full, 300
Spinney, George F., 169
Sporting News of Times, 301,

371
Springfield Republican, 151
Star, The, 113

Star Route frauds, 1881, 146
Steamship, use of in journalism,

8,37
Stevens, Thaddeus, 65
Strauss, Samuel, 376
Sumter, Fort, attack on, 51, 62
Sun, New York, 6, 7, 9, 19, 94, 203,

204, 223, 224, 390
Sunday Magazine of Times, 212
Sunday Times, The, first issue, 63
Sweeney, Peter B., 90, 100
Swinton, William, ^8
Sjmdicalism, 268

Taft, William Howard, 250, 297
Tammany Hall, 8, 12, 18, 59, 76,
86, 88, 97, '115, 222, 235,
.236
Tariff, 74, 146, 249
Taylor, G. B., 377
Taylor, James B., 81, 92, 128
Telegraph, use of in journalism, 8,
33, 37, 43,. 53, 289, 297,383
Temps, Le (Paris), 209
Thompson, J. H., 377
Tilden, Samuel J., 74, 112, 114,

^., 125,130,133^^^^?-

Tilton, Theodore, 124

Times Buildings, first, 47, 322;

second, 165, 322; present,

191, 322 et seq.
Times jor California, 24
Times Illustrated Magazine, 213

Times-Recorder Company, 182

Times, The New York, character
of, ix et seq., 6, 24, 176, 188,
243 et seq., 370 et seq.; estab-
lishment of, 5; first issue, 20,
225; policies, ix, 48, 53, 154,
219 et seq., 243 et seq., 310 et
seq., 370 et seq., etc.; staff, 48,
60, 370 et seq., etc.

Titanic disaster, 295

Tracy, Benjamin F., 74

Trask, Spencer, 181, 184

Tribune, New York, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9,
II, 12, 19, 20, 23, 26, 33, 59,
76, 83, 84, 94, 123, 133, 135,
196, 236, 241, 341

Truman, Ben C, Major, 57

Trusts, 267

Tweed, W. M., 40, 75, 81 ^^ seq.,
89, no

Typographical Union, 274

Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act,

.252
United Press organization, 179;

end of, 240
United States as world power, 248

Van Anda, Carr V., xiii, 274, 364
Venezuelan question, 159
Verdun, battle of, 362
Versailles, Treaty of, 372
Viaduct Railroad scheme, 100
Victoria, Queen, 37; jubilee of,

213
Von Briesen, Arthur, 339

Wade, Ben, 65

Wall Street, 75, 83, 164

Wallach, Leopold, 178, 377

Walsh, T. J., Senator, 347

War Department, in Civil War,

Weather, 25

Webb, James W^atson, 4, 5, 9, 28,

29, 30
Webster, Daniel, 29
Weed, Thurlow, 4, 16, 17
Weekly Family Times, 23, 24
Wellman, Walter, 290
Wells, David A., 74
Wesley, E. B., 5, 12, 17, 26, 27
Westbrook, Theodoric R., 148

433

INDEX

Whig, 9, I4» 29, 32 „ . . ,
"White Paper," British, 373;

German, 337» 338
Wile, Frederic WiUiam, 337
Wiley, Louis, xiv
Wilkie, Enid, 363
Williams, George F., 57
Williams, Wythe, 362
Wilson, Woodrow, 250, 251, 252,

350, 352 et seq.y 372
Wireless, use of in journalism,

277 et seq.

Wood, Fernando, 88
Woodward, James T., 184
World, New York, 183, 195, 196,
200, 222, 231, 232, 237, 238,
239, 25S> 287, 341, 3Si» 390
World War, 187, 246, 253, 300,
331 etseq.

Yancey, William L., 50
"Yellow" journaUsm, 7, 19S, 234,

^47„ . ,
Young, Brigham, 41

434

DATE DUE

9:\b\ j

\PR ^- ^

'006

)

GAYLORD

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

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Davis, Elmer Holmes

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